[mythtv-users] Shared filesystem that looks different to different machines

[Mike Holden]

Mike Holden wrote:
> Sounds like a weird question, so let me elucidate!
>
> On my mythtv box, I have a directory which contains all my ripped
> CDs. This is shared via nfs and samba so that all other machines
> (there's windows and linux clients) in the network can access them
> to play music. Let's call this /myth/music.
>
> The issue is that when this area is shared with iTunes, iTunes
> insists on putting the downloaded podcasts in /myth/music/Podcasts.
> There is no configuration for the podcasts location, it always puts
> it at one level below your music. This is fine for a single user.
>
> The problem comes when several people want to use iTunes to access
> the music and load their own podcasts, because the podcasts area is
> also shared via the same location for all users.
>
> Therefore I need everyone to access /myth/music as a shared area,
> but everyone needs to be able to access /myth/music/Podcasts as a
> different area to all the other users.
>
> I've tried Googling this, but not come up with the right combination
> of vague words to find a solution here.
>
> The only way I've thought of to work round this so far is to maybe
> create /myth/music/Podcasts as a symbolic link to /local/Podcasts,
> which is outside of /myth/music, and then share /myth/music out to
> different Linux boxes, and each user obtains /myth/music from a
> different server, all of which have a different /local/Podcasts.
> This sounds like it should work, but I haven't tried it yet.
>
> I don't want to duplicate the music - there's over 15,000 tracks in
> there, and the collection is not fully online yet! This would be a
> major waste of disk.
>
> Can anyone think of any other way of doing this so that each user
> can share a single copy of the music and have a local copy of
> podcasts, given the invariance in the iTunes setup for the location
> of the podcasts?
>
> Thanks for any suggestions.
> --
> Mike Holden

A quick update.

In the end, I decided against the nested nfs mounts. A lot of that
discussion was superfluous (talk of running exportfs after a resync
etc.), especially, as I stated, clients are Windows.

I liked the idea of using hard links, and went down that path. A
simple "cp -al" copies the "master" tree over to a "copy" tree, and
the copies have the "Podcasts" directory soft linked to an area on
the same disk that's specific to that user, and it works well.

Thanks to all for their suggestions. As usual, the MythTV community
comes up trumps, even when the connection to MythTV can be a bit
tangential at times!
-- 
Mike Holden