[mythtv-users] Userfreindly filenames of .nuv files?

[Michael T. Dean]

Jules Bean wrote:

> Nick Rout wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 23 Nov 2005 17:40:31 +1000
>>
>>>> Do you know why the symlinks that I created with mythlink.sh don't 
>>>> work 
>>>
>>> when using them from a remote computer with the myth machines hard 
>>> drive connect as an NFS drive over the network? Either that or 
>>> programs like Xine can't play video files via symlinks, and gmplayer 
>>> and kaffeine
>>> won't even show symlinks in their file open dialogs?
>>
>> remote filesystems often don't follow synlinkls, its a security thing.
>
> This is as far as I know not true. I have used symlinks over NFS in 
> the past quite extensively.
>
> Typically they should be relative. Does this script perhaps use 
> absolute links?
>
> (Incidentally, programs which don't show symbolic links in their file 
> dialogs are really broken)

Jules is basically right.  The problem is not that the remote filesystem 
doesn't follow symlinks, it's that NFS allows the symlink to be read as 
a symlink.  Then, the local kernel attempts to follow the symlink and 
that file location doesn't exist on your local machine.  If you make 
sure that the path to the recordings directory is identical on the local 
filesystem, it will work.  For example, if you have your recordings in 
"/myth/recordings" on the backend, either mount "/myth" at "/myth" or 
mount the recordings directory at "/myth/recordings" (depending on how 
much of the myth tree you want exported).

Another option is to use Samba.  With Samba you can a) specify a 
password (unlike NFS, which simply uses UID--which is easy to fake), b) 
potentially get better filesystem performance (although tuning Samba is 
significantly more difficult than tuning NFS, so often you get worse 
performance), c) access the linked files (Samba allows you to specify 
you want it to follow symlinks for you since Windows doesn't support 
symlinks).

Mike