SageTV service + UNC pathnames

[neilbradley]

I'd really like to run SageTV as a service so other machines in the house can connect and use it. My current setup:

\\media\c - This is the computer I have in my living room with a 200 gigabyte drive. I have 180 gigs of it devoted to SageTV spooling

Two shares are available over my gigabit network to a dual 3.4Ghz P4 server system with 2 dedicated SATA drives (machine is running Samba under FreeBSD 6.0):

\\beacon\video1 - 250GB
\\beavon\video2 - 400GB

In SageTV, I have my spool directories set up as follows:

\\beacon\video1
\\beacon\video2
c:\SageTV

And when I run SageTV as an application it works great. The trouble comes when I attempt to run SageTV as a service. The "SageTV as a service" configuration completely ignores the two UNC named shares.

I suspect that this is a problem because the \\media machine's login is not the same as the login required to get to the file shares on \\beacon. Is there any way, within SageTV, to supply username/password information to the remote machine? I can mount those drives all day long provided I have a good username/password, but I'm unclear how I can accomplish this with SageTV running as a service.

-->Neil

[Opus4]

To have the service access UNC paths, the service has to log in as a user with a password and that user has to have permission to read/write at the UNC path you want it to use (see p. 15-16 in the v4 PDF manual).

- Andy

[neilbradley]

Thanks for the note, Andy.

It gets a bit trickier than that. The problem is the remote username and the local user name do not match. For example:

.\nb Is the username for the local machine. If I change this to my login (e.g. 'nb'), I get "Cannot log on" when I try to start the service.

I cannot specify ".\nb" on \\beacon because it's not a valid username.

The problem is I can't specify a different username and password for the UNC share. I'm not running a domain, and there's no central login authority. \\beacon Has its own permissioning, and I must connect to it using the username/password it needs. Is this a feature that could be added to SageTV? Under Windows I can mount a UNC pathname and change the user/password, but I can't under SageTV. ;-(

-->Neil

[nielm]

Enable guest access with full control to the shares on \\beacon so that the Sage system can write to it without needing to specifically log on.

No idea how to do this on Samba (possibly 'guest ok = yes' in the conf for the share) -- you may be able to configure it only to allow \\media\guests to have full control which might make it a bit more secure..

I'd really like to run SageTV as a service so other machines in the house can connect and use it.

Note you don't have to run Sage as a Windows service to act as a Sage Server -- it can do this as a normal user process (obviously you would need to have a user permanently logged on to the Sage box, which can be a disadvantage)...

This would allow you to use your mapped drives connected using a specific user (as that is handled by Windows Explorer).

[neilbradley]

Nielm, you are THE MAN. I went in to Samba, enabled guest access, and now it's running as a service with UNC pathnames. Whoopee!!!! Thanks!

[nielm]

Originally Posted by neilbradley

Nielm, you are THE MAN. I went in to Samba, enabled guest access, and now it's running as a service with UNC pathnames. Whoopee!!!! Thanks!

You may need to change some permissions of existing files on the Samba box -- I believe Samba's guest account is the 'nobody' account (check recently recorded files), so sage may have problems deleting files created by 'real' users...