[mythtv-users] OT: SMB browsing (Was: Open VPN server on backend)

[Simon Hobson]

Stephen Worthington <stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:

> I am running OpenVPN in bridged mode, so I can access Windows/SMB shares on my network - access to the broadcast packets is needed for that to work.

That's not correct. SMB filesharing will work just fine across routed networks.
It does however need a little help from the network to make the default browsing work - as in a workgroup based computer go into file manager and be able to browse servers that aren't in the local broadcast domain.

It's a lot of years since I last played with this, so I can't remember the details. I vaguely recall we had Samba v3 running as a domain controller at each site, and it took care of broadcasting a complete server/device list to each local network. I know we have customers at work who do cross site file sharing which is (other than speed) transparent to users - but that's all using active directory which looks like a black art to me ;-)

Even without the browsing, you can connect to a remote share by IP, ie by going to \\192.168.57.89\myfiles instead of \\myserver\myfiles