Kodi Community Forum

Hi there!

I'm pretty new to Kodi, although I already used to use it back in the summer via an Amazon Fire Stick on my old Samsung TV.

Yesterday, I decided to come back to Kodi and installed the App on my new SmartTV and wanted to access my shared folders on my notebook which runs now Kubuntu 18.04.
Part of these shared folders are on my internal harddrive, some others are on my external disks.

For this, I did a right click on the folder → shares. There I checked Share via Samba and Permit access for everyone / guests (literally traduced from German ). Furthermore I defined the share rights and gave Full controll to the user Everyone and to my regular user Chip.

Now, I can see all the shared folders, but once I choose the ones on my external harddrive, a lock preference screen appears and asks me to introduce a username and a password, which are not the same as my regular user on my notebook.

It's also very interesting, that I can enter via Kodi without any prompts / problems every shared folder in my regular /home/, i. e. /home/Downloads or /home/Pictures.
But trying to enter a folder which is stored on my external disk, results in the mentioned behaviour.

My external drives have both a static label: CHIP WD and CHIP WD Ultra (checked also with the command sudo blkid).
So I can access them on my notebook following the path: /media/CHIP WD/ or /media/CHIP WD Ultra/.

What am I doing wrong? Why I'm not allowed to access the shared folders on my external drives via Kodi?!
Do I miss some setting(s) somewhere?!

I search already via Google, but all the results I'm getting about this issue, are explaining what to do and how to change the settings on Windows, but I'm using Kubuntu 18.04.

Thank you all in advance for your support and help!
Chipy

P.D. 1: If this is of concern, I renamed the preinstalled perfile of the Master user to Chip and tried already to set a numeric password / master code. Having a master code set or turned off, didn’t change anything.
P.D. 2: I'm having the mentioned problems on both TVs (old Samsung & new Sony). So what worked back in the summer on the old Samsung TV (accessing shared folders on external drive; my notebook was running Kubuntu 16.04 then), now stopped to work the right way.

This is a SAMBA issue rather than a Kodi issue, so nothing to do with the version of Kodi.  However, I know a bit about SAMBA so I'll try to lend a hand here.

Can you compare the ownership/permissions of those that work versus those that do not?  Also, it may be useful to post your samba config file (/etc/samba/smb.conf) to examine the settings there.

Also, just to clarify... when you say "wanted to access my shared folders on my notebook" am I to understand you want Kodi to read content on the Kubuntu laptop, and you're using SAMBA to share them out for the Kodi on the TV to connect to?

(2018-12-02, 23:02)Preacher Wrote: [ -> ]This is a SAMBA issue rather than a Kodi issue, so nothing to do with the version of Kodi.  However, I know a bit about SAMBA so I'll try to lend a hand here.

Can you compare the ownership/permissions of those that work versus those that do not?  Also, it may be useful to post your samba config file (/etc/samba/smb.conf) to examine the settings there.

Also, just to clarify... when you say "wanted to access my shared folders on my notebook" am I to understand you want Kodi to read content on the Kubuntu laptop, and you're using SAMBA to share them out for the Kodi on the TV to connect to?

 Hi Preacher,
thank you very much for your reply!
I'm very glad you know a bit about Samba and can help me.

First of all: Yes, when I mentioned, "I wanted to access my shared folders on my notebook", I mento, I was in Kodi on my SmartTV and wanted to read content on the Kubuntu laptop using SAMABA to share the files.

The ownership / permissions of those that work versus those that do not, are exactly the same.
Thi only difference: those that work are on my internal harddrive; those that do not are on an external harddrive.

My samba.conf looks like this.

Thank you in advance for your further help.

Chipy

Well, guys, I was so frustrated and went on playing a little bit around.

Finally, I found some website talking about samba users etc.
So, found the right code snippet and added the following in the console:

sql:
mark@chip:~$ sudo smbpasswd -a mark

There was an advice to use a username which exists already in the system on the laptop. So I used my standard profile: mark.

After this, I restared the Samba Service: [syntax=sql]sudo systemctl restart smbd.service[/sql] and voilá: Everything works now like a charm!!!
I added some new folders to share and they all appear without any problems in Kodi and I can open all of them and the read the files included in them. FINALLY!!!

It's still strange, why it was possible before to access the directory on the internal harddrive without any user in the Samba Database, but not a directory on the external drives.

Peacher, thanks anyway!
Wishing all a good start in the new week tomorrow!

Chipy

Good work!

I actually suspect some underlying file permissions in which you could guest-access local resources and there was no issue but the external drive is mounted as a specific account so guest was getting bounced/challenged.

For what it's worth: when diagnosing samba issues I would run "tail -f" on the logfiles (/var/log/samba/smb.log or so) then attempt the connection, so I'd see new log entries appear as soon as something failed.  This was the next thing to suggest to see if the logs revealed any issue.

Anyhow, glad to hear you got it working!