My Echo can't find mapped HDD

Talk with fellow members about Ceton's Media Center Extender.
Forum rules
Ceton no longer participate in this forum. Official support may still be handled via the Ceton Ticket system.
Post Reply
Plansberg

Posts: 18
Joined: Sun Mar 17, 2013 1:19 pm
Location:

HTPC Specs: Show details

My Echo can't find mapped HDD

#1

Post by Plansberg » Sun Mar 17, 2013 6:25 pm

Hello,everyone,
Some of my films are on a Nas Synology
On my PC I mapped the folder on my pc and get a Letter as "M:"
On the WMC on PC I use Media Browser plug in everything is ok
On the ECHO I don't get the movies from this drive
When I try to add the Drive "M:" at the library in Echo it's impossible ECHO do not see "M:"
Anyone notice it ? :crazy:
Thank ou for your help
Pascal

waldoverkill

Posts: 11
Joined: Mon Jun 20, 2011 11:05 pm
Location:

HTPC Specs: Show details

#2

Post by waldoverkill » Sun Mar 17, 2013 6:46 pm

Extenders cannot see mapped drives. You will need to point media browser at the UNC path. e.g. \\NASName\Media rather than m:

Plansberg

Posts: 18
Joined: Sun Mar 17, 2013 1:19 pm
Location:

HTPC Specs: Show details

#3

Post by Plansberg » Sun Mar 17, 2013 7:20 pm

Thank you very much

Sammy2

Posts: 1708
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2012 7:35 pm
Location:

HTPC Specs: Show details

#4

Post by Sammy2 » Sun Mar 17, 2013 7:31 pm

Yup. That'll do it. Then you'll need to re-scan in MB for your library to show again.

foxwood

Posts: 1761
Joined: Fri Sep 07, 2012 3:43 pm
Location:

HTPC Specs: Show details

#5

Post by foxwood » Mon Mar 18, 2013 1:25 am

To provide a bit more background, an Extender logs into your PC as a second (or third, etc) user. That user has its own mapped drives (if there was an easy way to set them up) and doesn't see the mapped drives of the foreground user.

You can verify this for yourself by creating a second user and using the Switch User function and seeing that one user doesn't see another users mapped resources.

ajhieb

Posts: 272
Joined: Sun Feb 24, 2013 2:34 am
Location:

HTPC Specs: Show details

#6

Post by ajhieb » Mon Mar 18, 2013 1:47 am

waldoverkill wrote:Extenders cannot see mapped drives. You will need to point media browser at the UNC path. e.g. \\NASName\Media rather than m:
Actually, that might fix it.

Depending on the network resource you are trying to connect to, the MCX# user account might not have permissions to access said UNC path. If you have your permissions wide open then you shouldn't have any problems connecting, but if you have any sort of access control setup, just switching to UNC paths probably won't fix your problem.

To get around the User Access Control you can create login scripts for the MCX# accounts, but without Win7Ultimate that is tricky.

There is however a tool that I've had very good luck with...

http://tobias-tobin.blogspot.com/2008/0 ... ss-to.html

...that will allow you to create the login scripts with very little effort.

foxwood

Posts: 1761
Joined: Fri Sep 07, 2012 3:43 pm
Location:

HTPC Specs: Show details

#7

Post by foxwood » Mon Mar 18, 2013 2:21 am

I believe you can achieve much the same end by adding a script to the startup folder for the MCX user.

The key point, though, as you pointed out, is permissions.

grinchy

Posts: 198
Joined: Wed Oct 12, 2011 2:42 am
Location:

HTPC Specs: Show details

#8

Post by grinchy » Tue Mar 19, 2013 2:23 pm

Yes, permissions and the tool above seemed to work well for most - for me, login scripts don't work well if you're using a NAS that may be in a sleep state at the time an extender logs in and the NAS is later woken up.

I think the best/easiest thing to do is setup the permissions directly on the extender for the username/pw required for the share - that worked for me, perfectly. It took a while for me to realize that you cound't just setup your libraries on the main pc with credentials; rather doing it at each extender.

ruff_hi

Posts: 79
Joined: Sun Nov 02, 2014 6:24 pm
Location:

HTPC Specs: Show details

#9

Post by ruff_hi » Thu Jul 09, 2015 6:44 pm

I just came across this very issue with my (relatively new) FreeNAS NAS, recorded TV moved to the NAS and my echo. I set up my main PC to also 'see' the recorded TV stuff on the NAS ... but the echo wasn't having any of that. It did let me go through the process of including a library from a different PC ... but the Echo doesn't have permissions access to the NAS.

So ...
grinchy wrote:I think the best/easiest thing to do is setup the permissions directly on the extender for the username/pw required for the share - that worked for me, perfectly.
... seems like the answer. Now all I need is the echo username and password. How do I find that?

grinchy

Posts: 198
Joined: Wed Oct 12, 2011 2:42 am
Location:

HTPC Specs: Show details

#10

Post by grinchy » Sun Jul 12, 2015 2:00 am

Hmm - not sure I follow. You shouldn't need the echo's user account PW to set this up (i.e. the mcx account that WMC created for the extender). On my nas, I created a dedicated "extender" account for the various folders I wanted them to access. Then, I launched WMC on each extender, added the library's in the echo session and specified the extender account I created on my NAS for accessing content. From that point forward, the echos (or any other extender you setup) should be good to go; you'll need to do these same steps on each extender you setup, of course.

ruff_hi

Posts: 79
Joined: Sun Nov 02, 2014 6:24 pm
Location:

HTPC Specs: Show details

#11

Post by ruff_hi » Wed Jul 15, 2015 11:31 am

grinchy wrote:Hmm - not sure I follow. You shouldn't need the echo's user account PW to set this up (i.e. the mcx account that WMC created for the extender).
I did get this to work. Here is what I did ... but don't think it is ideal.

I created a CIFS share on my FreeNAS machine that only shares the recorded TV folder. It allows guest access ... so anyone can see that folder. I then added the FreeNAS recorded TV folder to the extender libraries. This took me a few tries as the first time it wanted to add the whole network drive and the explicit recorded TV folder. That gave me (what appeared to be) two of everything. After removing the path to the whole network drive and leaving (only) the recorded TV folder ... I am able to see the network based recorded TV files ... and only one version of them.
grinchy wrote:On my nas, I created a dedicated "extender" account for the various folders I wanted them to access.
Can you clarify this a little? Did you create a NAS account for your extender ... or ... did you create an extender folder ... or ... did you create an extender share? On FreeNAS you can add users and passwords, but for it to work seamlessly with my windows PC, I had to create a FreeNAS user with the same name (and password if I wanted security) as my windows login.
grinchy wrote:Then, I launched WMC on each extender, added the library's in the echo session ...
That makes it sound like you created an extender folder.
grinchy wrote:... and specified the extender account I created on my NAS for accessing content.
but this makes it sound like you had to specify a user. Maybe you did both. Can you provide some more detail around the 'specified the extender account' part?

Re 'the mcx account that WMC created for the extender' ... what sort of account is that? I can't see it in my list of windows accounts (login). Is it a share account? How can I get some details around this account that WMC created.

grinchy

Posts: 198
Joined: Wed Oct 12, 2011 2:42 am
Location:

HTPC Specs: Show details

#12

Post by grinchy » Wed Jul 15, 2015 6:15 pm

Hi - Hopefully I can help and it was rather simple after realizing you have to do setup at the extender end vs. the WMC pc; semantics getting in the way :) I will say that I did not attempt to place my recorded tv drive outside of the main WMC PC; there are (were?) some limitations in remotely locating that folder so I just had a dedicated recording drive on the WMC PC. That said, the folders on my NAS were shares for Picture, Music, Movies and Videos.

Clarification/background (which has little to nothing regarding the steps I performed) - the MCX account is the user account/profile/pw that gets created automatically by WMC when you add an extender; you won't be able to login manually with this account nor grab the PW so nothing to worry about on that end... the only things you can really do is modify account level reg settings, add startup scripts to the account and other non-interactive tweaks. You can view which account it is by simply turning on the extender and then logging into your WMC pc and view all accounts logged in (say, through task manager->users), FYI.

So what I did... on my NAS (Synology in my case) - I had CIFS shares for each applicable folder already. I had disabled the guest account on the NAS itself for reasons I can't entirely remember, but it was for extender issues :)... I want to say that the extender was attempting to login via a guest account on it's own which was getting in the way of things working properly; but it was such a long time ago, I don't remember. With the guest account disabled on the NAS itself, nothing on the network can browse those shares (obviously). So, (again) on the NAS, I created a specific username/PW that could access the CIF shares that I would want the extenders to access. In my case, I called the user "mcxExtender" and gave it a PW and appropriate access on the NAS.

Then, I simply logged into each extender (i.e. booted up WMC extender interface from the Xbox, Echo, DMA, etc.) and configured the appropriate share folder for each library/section I wanted to access. I.e. for Pictures, I set access to \\[nas]\Pictures and then specified the account I created on the NAS ("mcxExtender" in this example); this is in the advanced options in the configuration UI, IIRC.

So to answer your question, I did both - created a dedicated user account on my NAS for the extenders to use (which truthfully could have been *ANY* NAS account that had access to those shares) and then specified this user for each library/share I configured at the extender's end.

Hopefully this makes sense - it sounds like you're pretty close to getting this stuff figured out, though.

ruff_hi

Posts: 79
Joined: Sun Nov 02, 2014 6:24 pm
Location:

HTPC Specs: Show details

#13

Post by ruff_hi » Wed Jul 15, 2015 7:00 pm

Thanks for the detailed answer. Lots to look at when I get home.
grinchy wrote:Then, I simply logged into each extender (i.e. booted up WMC extender interface from the Xbox, Echo, DMA, etc.) and configured the appropriate share folder for each library/section I wanted to access. I.e. for Pictures, I set access to \\[nas]\Pictures and then specified the account I created on the NAS ("mcxExtender" in this example); this is in the advanced options in the configuration UI, IIRC.
The bolded part is not something that I remember seeing. I will take a look.

ruff_hi

Posts: 79
Joined: Sun Nov 02, 2014 6:24 pm
Location:

HTPC Specs: Show details

#14

Post by ruff_hi » Wed Jul 15, 2015 9:28 pm

grinchy wrote:You can view which account it is by simply turning on the extender and then logging into your WMC PC and view all accounts logged in (say, through task manager->users), FYI.
Home now and I can confirm that 'task manager -> users' does show the mcx* user.

Post Reply