Kodi Community Forum

Hi - I have Windows 10 Pro running on a NUC6CAYH. There are many shared media folders, primarily on my external 4TB USB 3.0 HDD. They are set to "Everyone - Full Control" because I couldn't give one half of a crap about security at this point (plus it's inside my personal network.)

Everything is hooked up via CAT6 Ethernet and gigabit Netgear switches across the house.

The drive is shared from the NUC via SMB to a Paragon-equipped Mac Mini hooked up to a TV in one room, and an Nvidia Shield TV in another room. I've been fighting this crap so long I've probably posted about it before.

All devices are using static IPs within the network for my own sanity. No connectivity issues with the NTFS-formatted USB 3.0 drive to the NUC.

It will run fine for days and days, and then I install something on the Mac and reboot... everything goes haywire. Sometimes it affects the Shield, more often the Mac.

When it does finally decide to connect, it's completely, totally random. I'll go to Finder, Go, Connect to server, smb://10.0.1.183 sixty five times. 2 days later, It'll connect on the 4th try. W.T.F. There's no logic, no standard troubleshooting I can even begin to think of.

I downloaded some freeware package from www.jankamp.com that worked the first time. Now it says all shares are in perfect condition. No, they're not.

If there was a $500 piece of software that guaranteed share continuity in perpetuity that I could have up and running in the next 5 minutes with no fighting, no troubleshooting, no crap - just a simple install wizard, I would own it immediately. I have the full Paragon driver suite installed on Windows 10 and macOS Sierra, so that's not an issue.

The Nvidia Shield doesn't care what filesystem you're using.

Isn't it 2017? Why is this still happening? Not a clue where to go from here, and quite surprised that nobody seems to have cashed in on this obvious problem by coming up with some legit software to repair share issues and just run in the system tray or something. I know it's not just me - I've seen others mystified as well with intermittent Windows shares.

Help. Please.

igh:

Couple of issues can be causing this.

1. USB in Windows (not sure about MAC) can at time re-connect (for lack of a better term), and grab a different drive letter. Or sometimes, they will go to sleep, and come back with a different drive letter, or just disconnect and reconnect (but keeping the drive letter), Any of these can cause issues with Kodi's databases.

2. Windows HomeGroup networking cause also cause all kinds of issues with Non-Windows.

3. If you are using an network connection that is built into your Motherboard, this can also cause issues (especially if it is not an Intel based Nic). So a cheap fix might be to buy an Intel based NIC card to plug into your Motherboard.

4. Also, try to share the USB drive from your Nvidia Shield instead of from your Windows System.

Hope one of the above helps you out.

Dang...who'd a thunk....

Funny though, I have built in Realtek NIC on every PC, NO Windows Homegroup at all and some of my sources are on a Windows 10 Home Zotac BI320...never had an SMB issue except for Android devices that Kodi 17 didn't install correctly on (Known Bug been fixed in nightly builds). Guess I'm just lucky

An issue which I haven't seem a lot of discussion about is the 'shared folder gets unshared of external or off-line drives' perhaps there's a work around I havne't seen or the new o/s have this covered? So My Nvidia Shiled is connected to my PC via lan through router, I got numerous internal and external drives, when all online and all the drives are shared, no issue. Turn off some of the drives (icy dock switches and external drives off switches) and come back a few days later and those off drives have the 'shared' toggled to off... What you say, yup the little MS gremlins have decided, I could have replaced the drive (keep in mind all the drives are manually labelled way down the alphabet).

So now I've got to manually go back into each drives properties and share them again.

Seesm the work around is RMTSHARE.EXE \\yourComputerName\"shareNameYouWant"="driveLetter:\directoryName" /UNLIMITED

http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f...ost1170476

***Thank you, Powerhouse, for your suggestions and thoughts. You're right - Homegroup is very much a flawed product. I paid for Windows 10 Pro for my Intel NUC to ensure more network capabilities, and I may be taking advantage of some of those, but it sure doesn't seem easy.

I've used Windows at work since I was a teenager (~13 years ago) but at home I use Mac. Unfortunately it's got it's own SMB issues. They apparently have shifted from SMB 1.0 up to 3.0 and ended up back at 1.0. Someone created a tool called SMBUp that theoretically solved Mac SMB issues, and it did work to some degree, but I inevitably ran into issues with it.

As far as using the Nvidia Shield as the video source - I did when I was using Plex and performing transcoding, and Android is just bad at filesharing. Now I'm 100% using Kodi, 100% H.265/HEVC, and 100% using players that have hardware-based HEVC decoding.

Seems nobody has filesharing right. I've never owned one, but one of these days I'll be able to afford a nice NAS / RAID rig with tons of storage, the lovely mirrored backups, and as I understand it, its own OS centered around filesharing.... if that's literally the product's purpose and if it doesn't work well, I will probably lose my mind.

***Thanks to PatK for the link to that very relevant external forum thread. I've created many (some fairly sophisticated... relatively speaking) batch files to solve problems / automate things at work, and it just never crossed my mind! (Also I would have needed to know about that RMTSHARE.EXE file even if I had thought about a batch file "repair" either at login or just something I can double click to fix the problem right away.)

For NOW it's temporarily fixed itself once again...but I'm going to proceed with the batch file described on that thread, as I know the shares will break on me again.

I suspect that the problem lies in the "master" in the SMB. Probably when one of the devices is elected it is not capable of acting as master.

This link applies to LibreELEC, but the discussion lends insight.https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread-1252.h...ight=samba