Posts tagged #SMB

Kodi Media Playback Stops Frequently

Ever since the good-old Popcorn Hour died last year, we've been consuming our media through a Minix media player with XBMC, or Kodi as it's called since version 15. And even though this was a complete package (everything configured and pre-installed), it had a learning curve and required more maintenance than the Popcorn Hour.

A couple of weeks back, we started to experience cut-offs in the media we were consuming. TV shows, and movies stopped for no reason. The image froze, audio cut-out, and the subtitles would go on like nothing was wrong. After a few seconds display goes black, and after 5 to 10 seconds the Kodi-menu would present itself.
At this point we would select play, and the TV show, or movie would continue were it had stopped.

The stopping (or crashing) of the media could occur 1-10 times in a movie and a couple of times in a TV show. One or two times is already annoying, so you can imaging what 10 or 15 'crashes' might invoke....

Posted on December 1, 2015 and filed under Tips'n Tricks, Software, Hardware, Annoying.

Apple Snow Leopard and FileVault (part deux)

A while back, I wrote a couple of blog posts about the FileVault quirks in OSX. The problems seemed to be gone with the upgrade to Snow Leopard, but this week I ran into a (new??) 'feature'?

When I remove a directory on a (SMB) file-share it removes the files and directory (or so it seems). But after a couple of seconds the (empty) directory re-appears.

Posted on January 20, 2010 and filed under Annoying, Apple, Software.

Why Linux Won't Work

.... for me at this moment (and probably for most others).

I'm still in the fase of migrating my Windows server to a more 'reliable' Operating System. The new server should cover the following basic functionalities:

  • Filesharing (either via Samba or NFS)
  • Webserver with PHP and Coldfusion
  • SSH server
  • RADIUS Server
  • Central user database (e.g. an LDAP server)
  • a NZB downloader of some sort
  • etc.

Up till now I've tried several Linux distros (Ubuntu 7, Ubuntu 8, and CentOS 5), and none of them are that easy to configure.

It seems that NFS isn't that easy to configure, since Apple OSX requires some special features (standards anyone??). Especially when you want some sort of user authentication. Just do a search on Linux, NFS and Apple OSX.

So after NFS didn't really work, I tried SMB for filesharing. While CentOS has some GUI to configure the shares, it lacks the interface of permissions for users...
You create users within the Linux environment, and if you wanna connect to a Samba share you need to configure additional users (in a different userdatabase).
This can be done by synchronization, but you need to do some scripting etc.

So far I've managed to install a working SSH server (with x509 authentication) and a Webserver.

When I compare this with Windows.... Well, there's no real comparison. Windows has a real central user database (not talking about the Active Directory here, but the local user database). And every service I need can talk to this database, and every service recognizes this database. No need to start 'hacking' some configuration files to make it work.

Well, as long as there's no new (read:better) interface of configuring those services and combining them with a shared user database ....

LINUX >> /dev/null

Recommendations can be left in the comments (if there are any)......

Posted on March 24, 2009 and filed under Annoying, Apple, Linux, Microsoft.