[Pete7874]

Hello,

When I try to configure a new share in XBMC 11 using WebDAV protocol, it asks for things like remote path, username, password. How do I know what to enter in these fields?

I've configured webDAV on a remote Windows 7 64 machine and have Basic Authentication enabled in there, but at no point during the configuration did it ever ask me to specify a username and password that all the clients should be using. So how do I know what username and password to use within XBMC for this?

Thanks!

[Ned Scott]

Does it work if you leave them blank? I can't recall off hand for webDAV on Windows if there's a default username, but I would try just seeing if it works without one.

[Pete7874]

No.

I get a message saying: Unable to connect. Could not retrieve directory information. This could be due to network not being connected.

[Fry7]

Although I would be interested in how you managed to configure WebDAV in Win7 with http or https, the website you must have set up for this still needs some kind of authentication, e.g a local user account on that WebDAV-server.

A quick google brought me to this:

Code:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters

The key BasicAuthLevel has to be set to 2 on the client (if it is Vista or 7 or 8) in order to let it really use basic authentication, which these OSs don't like due to security reasons... The client needs a reboot after that change.

[Pete7874]

Code:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters

Thanks. Tried it. Still nothing. On top of that, when I rebooted the remote machine, somehow my TeamViewer client did not get up properly, so I lost control over the remote machine. Will be a week before I can physically tend to it. Oh well.

Still trying to find the best way to stream movies in XBMC from a remote PC. Tried FTP before - it was very clunky. Can't figure this webDAV stuff either. What else is there that's not rocket science?

[Fry7]

Thanks. Tried it. Still nothing. On top of that, when I rebooted the remote machine, somehow my TeamViewer client did not get up properly, so I lost control over the remote machine. Will be a week before I can physically tend to it. Oh well.

What a bummer, sorry to hear that. So TeamViewer, as a service that runs over http/s, seems to have a problem with basic authentication itself...
And b.t.w.: as I wrote, this setting had only to be changed on the client which wants to connect to the WebDAV-site that uses basic-auth, not the server that hosts that particular site...

If you say that you already tried ftp, then I guess you won't be happy with WebDAV anyway as it consumes even more overhead than ftp does, especially with SSL on top of it.

My suggestion would be to build a VPN to the remote location if your available bandwith is that high - what it seems to be - using hardware clients if possible. Then you could simply use smb or nfs, e.g.

[Pete7874]

Thanks. Any recommendations on free and reliable VPN software?

[Fry7]

As mentioned, separate hardware would be the best for that, e.g. two (not too) old PCs having 2 NICs, so one could use - free of charge for private use - the Sophos UTM Home Edition (formerly known as Astaro, registration required) which is a complete Linux based firewall system with a lot of features like complete and secure Site-2-Site-VPN, managed through a neat Webmin-based web-GUI.

If your machines on each site are powerful enough, you could also go for Virtual Machines (Virtual Box in my setup).

Still, quite a bunch of work to do, though - but rock stable (well, as stable as your internet connections) if up and running.

[Pete7874]

Got OpenVPN running via two Tomato routers. Still can't get to that one PC that got hosed after reboot, but I was able to access some of my other resources stored on a NAS. However, the transfer speed is lower than I expected. The place where the content is has 4 Mbps upload link, yet, when I pull large files from there, it transfer at less than 2 Mbps. Can VPN have this much overhead Maybe the routers aren't fast enough to process this, although looking at their CPU load, neither one is anywhere close to being maxed out during transfer.

Anyway under 2 Mpbs might be enough for standard quality video streaming (say a 700 MB video file for a 90 min movie), but it's not going to cut it for anything higher than that.

[Pete7874]

Did some more testing when network wasn't being utilized... looks like I'm getting about 240 KB/s over VPN and about 260-270 KB/s over FTP, so the VPN overhead isn't as much as I thought.

Anyway, thanks all.