Strange Samba Issue

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Ok so I built the microserver as a CentOS box and now I have a strange one

I built a CentOS 6.5 box with a 3.6 raid ext4 data drive on it, shared with samba.

Now when I browse these folders on the console I can see the files. when I
sftp on the command line from another box I can see these files.

But when I browse via samba or using a gui sftp client quite a lot of these files are missing…

Any ideas?

19 thoughts on - Strange Samba Issue

  • The strangest is that it’s not all the files I can see files in some folders but to others. If I sort alphabetically I get to about b.

  • Could there be a predetermined limit on the quantity of displayed entries or a buffer-full problem ?

  • Possibly, but I’ve moved a file from inside a folder to the top level and it still doesn’t show.

    It’s a 700G folder though.

  • Regret I don’t know. Hopefully the others may have a solution.

    What software gives the truncated results ?

  • Perhaps a bug or a configuration limitation.

    I use filezilla with SFTP. Never had a problem.

    When I left Windoze 4 or 5 years ago, I took essential data to CentOS
    and then never needed to access any Micro$oft machine. Just the thought of M$ and its many problems makes me cringe with distaste.

    Wishing you good luck and hoping the others can propose a solution.

  • Dunno I’ll need to check. I doubt it though.

    nfs seems pretty good on the mac and xbmc jobbie.

    The other media player is android so there’s probably no nfs client for that an dthe wife and kids are on windows so a dlna server we’ll have to find.

  • my experiences with trying to use DLNA for video have been awful. its OK
    for audio, as long as the library is both not too big, and well tagged.

  • What server software have you tried? I’m using serviio on a mac but would expect the linux version to be equivalent, with an assortment of players (ps3, sony blu-ray player, vlc on an ipad, etc.). The trick with video is to be sure it is encoded in a format the player can handle directly so the server isn’t transcoding on the fly. And avoid wifi if possible.

  • thats the problem. different clients have different unpublished format rules.

    i have devices that play HD mp4 and mkv files just fine via SMB, but refuse to acknowledge the same files as video if they are over DLNA and ask for them to be converted to something else. Or maybe they will play the video but don’t like the audio and want it transcoded. whaaa?

    That and the whole DLNA finder and tag system is awful. i have stuff directory structured and not all of it is well tagged. DLNA clients decide to lump it all in one virtual list, 12000 titles or whatever.
    needless to say, that crashed the browser on half the embedded players. different DLNA servers have a different idea of how tags should be structured. DLNA players kept insisting on showing me directories and files that I’d deleted a week ago. ugh, I quit.

    SMB gives me my directory structure, and thats fine, and the WD TV in particular has played just about everything I’ve thrown at it, AVI, MP4, MKV, TS, Ogg, Flac, etc etc.

  • Agreed, it is a mess.

    There is a scheme to recognize the players and serviio includes a lot of device profiles and allows you to add your own (although you have to edit some ugly xml). It will transcode or remux if necessary, but then you can’t move around in the file until the transcoding is complete.

    The presentation is at least partly up to the server. With serviio you can just expose the folder structure if you want and the clients I’ve used will navigate it. (Vlc in upnp mode is an exception that tries to digest the whole tree before displaying anything, although the most recent ios version works OK)

    And you can tell it how frequently to rebuild its index.

    Sure, but not everything will map smb shares, especially blu-ray players. My current cable tv setup has a central dvr (sort of a rebranded Arris Moxie) with media players at each tv that do DLNA
    reasonably well and its nice to not have to switch inputs or remotes to play local content. But from another computer, I’d just map the drive and run vlc.