Recently, on the Mythtv-users mailing list, Gabe Rubin posted a question asking why he was getting no thumbnails in his mythweb view. Having already resolved that problem in my own environment, I told him that there was a bug in CIFS that showed up when using the MythTV uPnP code (which Mythweb does as of 0.21) and he was better off using NFS if possible. I also offered to help him get NFS working using Microsoft Services for Unix (SFU). Silly me 🙂
I’d never previously setup SFU under Windows XP. I’d only ever used it under a ‘Server’ version of Windows. As it turns out, there is a bug (or is that a feature?) in the User Name Mapping (UNM) feature of SFU that causes it to fail on Windows XP if the username/password combination of the *nix account you want to map does not match the username/password combination of the Windows account it is mapped to. The way UNM is supposed to work, is that it will take any *nix user account and map it to any Windows user account. Username and password is not supposed to matter, and indeed, this is the way it works in Windows Server. Not so for Windows XP though.
So, for anybody out there trying to get SFU working properly (the NFS Server portion in particular) on a Windows XP machine, here are step-by-step instructions for what worked for me in my test-lab… Read More