Geeking out with file sharing on Extender
Normally I just have my main Media Center PC in the office that I use to keep all of my media content and I use my Extender to view it all in the living room on the TV. Since I’ve been testing the new Extenders at home though, and I don’t want to put test/beta bits on my main system (the wife-acceptance factor is pretty crucial here), I’ve had to setup a second PC.
I don’t want to have to copy over all of my media content from my main system to my secondary that the new Extender connects to, so I tried sharing out and using the folders off my main system. Normally this works pretty simply but just enabling the Guest account on the primary system. In most cases that will enable the second PC (and the Extender) to view the media content off of the primary. Unfortunately that didn’t work for me since I had already shared out my media folders with specific ACLs, which locks them down more tightly than they otherwise would be.
The next method I used to try and get this working was to follow the steps here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/932306/en-us. I did manage to get it working fine, but I didn’t feel comfortable with that solution since it made me disable password-protected file sharing. I’m not very keen on that idea…
So here is the final method I used and stuck with (for proper attribution - I got this courtesy of Chad Boles).
Here are the steps:
1. Create batch file called mcx.bat
a. This file should do “net use s: \\server\share passwd /user:user /persistent:no” to map the server share with appropriate credentials.
2. Share the directory holding the batch file out with the name “NETLOGON” with read privileges for everyone. Worth noting here is that you should not share this out under the Users directory of the hard disk – Vista will create a different share name for these. When I first tried this, I put the folder in Documents, which created the share path as \\server\Users\eric\Documents\NETLOGON instead of just \\server\NETLOGON. You can ACL the file and/or folder as well to keep your user account and password information protected.
3. Set the logon script for the MCXn user to “mcx.bat”
I’m guessing this isn’t a core scenario for most MCE users today, but with Windows Home Server coming around the corner, this will start becoming more commonplace. We’ll definitely have to look at making this more consistent and simple in the future… in the meantime, hope this helps.
