Anyone remember any tricks to cifs shares?

[The Keeper]

I just switched over to a new server (from the 200somethingW server I was using to a new 40W server), both running Win2k3, and the only thing I can't get to behave at the moment is the cifs shares so the audreys can play MP3s. It was working fine with the old server, but I can't figure out what the magic sauce was, I guess.

The old server was called "stn-j", and the new one is "chibi". I found references to the server name so far in the mountw2k.sh and hosts file. I don't remember if there are any other hard-coded references to the host name.

# /nto-bin/fs-cifs -a //chibi:192.168.0.2:/mp3 /music audrey audrey
io_mount: Bad file descriptor
/nto/bin/fs-cifs: missing arguments, or all mount attempts failed.
# ping -c 5 chibi
PING chibi (192.168.0.2): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.0.2: [insert success message here]
...

I've accessed the "mp3" share from my laptop, with the username and password of audrey, and the share came up, so it's not a permissions thing that I know of...

I did add "chibi" to my hosts file, replacing the previous reference to "stn-j" with "chibi".

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Chris

[Alconnell]

Which image are you using? I remember needing to edit boot.sh for one of them. btw, I like the server name. We just put our 16 yr. old cat, Chibi, to sleep last month. He was so named as the runt of the litter, but turned out to be one huge cat!

[The Keeper]

Sorry to hear of your loss. We have a geriatric female cat at the moment that's on medication for hyperthyroidism. Half a pill, twice a day. She's been on the medication for quite a while, actually, and is still kicking. Certainly easier to pill a cat than to give insulin shots, which is what we had to do with the last one...

"Chibi" seemed to be a good name for this server, being a ~10"x10"x5" mini-ITX case with a mirrored pair of 320GB 2.5" SATA drives and a SATA slimline DVD burner. My wife and I are a big fan of the Japanese aesthetic and culture, so more than a few systems are named after various Japanese items... My laptop is "unagi" (freshwater eel), the wife's laptop is "shinku" ("crimson", which is the name of the main protagonist in "Rozen Maiden"), the previous server's name is "stn-j" (from "Witch Hunter Robin"), the son's computer is "legokun" (the LEGO block company with the honorific "kun" appended)...

So, back to the audreys... I'm actually using the stock-type image, not the infinity-type. I've actually found them to be pretty stable, but only because they get powered off a lot, and when they're actually powered on, they're power-cycled if they don't respond to pings. It's usually only a couple times a month where you have to walk up to an audrey to tap a button in links_touchscreen to power-cycle another audrey.

Since I'm not using infinity, my boot.sh is pretty much unmodified. I'm actually thinking that maybe there's a problem with how "chibi" is configured... I sort of vaguely remember some sort of permissions problems in the past... I have the shares configured the same way, but maybe the username the fs-cifs uses has to have a blank password...

Chris

[sacarino]

I sort of vaguely remember some sort of permissions problems in the past... I have the shares configured the same way, but maybe the username the fs-cifs uses has to have a blank password...

I have zero experience with the Audrey but if you add "everyone" to the folder permissions list and give it read access, does that work?

[Alconnell]

I vaguely remember having some trouble getting it to work also, but I don't think it's your server. I've changed mine over recently and didn't do anything to it except make the folder shared. Have you checked on audreyhacking or linux-hacker? fwiw, I'm using guest/guest in my fs-cifs. Good luck.

[The Keeper]

Thanks for the replies, guys. As it turns out, it _was_ a problem with the new server, but the problem was at a ___really___ low level.

I spent another few minutes doing a side-by-side comparison of the two shares, and they were nearly identical. I also threw in a "-v" into the fs-cifs command line to look at more verbose output from the fs-cifs command, but that didn't really offer any further explanations.

So, then I started a Wireshark trace, and saw that there was simply a lot more network activity between an audrey connecting to the old server as compared to activity between an an audrey connecting to the new server.

At that point, knowing that it didn't even look like the audrey was trying to log in to the new server, I suspected my IP stack.

The new server has an Intel Atom-based motherboard, with one GigE port. There's only one PCI slot, occupied by an Adaptec SATA RAID card, so I can't add another port. (If I did have a spare PCI slot, I'd be installing a Fibre Channel PCI card, not another lowly ethernet port.)

Why would I need another ethernet port? Well, the audreys are fixed at 192.168.0.2, but my Linksys VPN router handles the DNS lookups, so I have to also have DHCP enabled on the new server. The old server, a Compaq ProLiant DL360 G2, had embedded dual GigE, so it was easy. Fix one, DHCP the other.

The desktop Atom mobo, however, only has one port, 'cuz the average user only needs one port.

I found a way to add fixed IP addresses to a port that's DHCP enabled. Go into the registry, find the ethernet port's registry keys, and add 192.168.0.2 after the 0.0.0.0 in IP address. (Same thing with the subnet mask.) An ipconfig /all shows both IP addresses.

Yeah, well, that's all fine and dandy, but the low-level stuff like netbios apparently doesn't take kindly to those sorts of games. The audreys that were pointing to the new server's 192.168.0.2 didn't work, but when I changed an audrey to point to 192.168.0.133 (the DHCP address), it did work. I switched all of the audreys over to the DHCP address, and hopefully the Linksys VPN router won't go and change the address on me... The DHCP lease will always be renewed, so it should be stable...

And I still can't have more than one audrey playing back MP3's at a time, even though I've switched to a completely new computer. Apparently my Netgear GS524T 24-port GigE switch doesn't like something about the way the audreys communicate with the server.

Chris