shares

XP Home: cannot access network shares

Many users report issues with sharing folders under XP Home, after getting a machine with this issue we could do some testing today.

First: the issue is about: trying to access a XP Home machine, where you can ‘logon’ to the Machine, but accessing the actually shared folders will be denied.

Irritating if you want to access your downloaded prOn movies from your PC and play it on your TV through your MediaPlayer.

Under XP/Vista you can read: Not enough server storage is available to process this command ..

Under Linux with a CIFS mount you can read: CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code -12

The errors refer to a memory issue. It was very hard to find the solution as the Help of Microsoft is a crime…  finally we found the reason: certain virus scanners like: NOD32, Norton Antivirus, IMB AntiVirus is causing you not to access network shares.

With a simple registryfix you can solve it.

CFULLHDMA: Trying to understand Samba

The Conceptronic CFULLHDMA has an automatical way of finding Samba Shares, to make life easy for customers. The device is using ‘smbtree’ for this purpose. smbtree is a text based network browser.

As I do a lot of testings I suddenly did not get any samba share to see on the CFULLHDMA anymore. Bummer, a bug? let’s find out …

Normally I have 6!! Samba shared devices in my network. Suddenly, after rebooting a PC (XP) and a NAS I lost all Samba shares to bee seen in my CFULLHDMA, reboot, turn off / turn on .. nothing helped.

Analyzing I found out following:

the smbtree was generating an error on the CFULLHDMA.

smbtree
session request to 192.168.1.30 failed (Called name not present)
Data overflow in cli_receive_trans

the 192.168.1.30 is my printserver, turning off that device only gave totally no output on running smbtree.

Using the same utility ‘smbtree’ on my Centos webserver (where aroundmyroom.com is running at) generated the same error. For me it meant that it was not a bug on my CFULLHDMA but a general ‘error’ within my network. Checking my network neighbourhood at my XP machine revealed only 1 samba share: a rebooted nas device I had to reset to factory defaults and modified on IP level again (fixed) and where I changed its Samba Share name as well. The rest of my shares were even not seen at my XP system, Linux Server or CFULLHDMA.

To solve the issue I did following:

I rebooted my DSL modem (router / dns / dhcp device) &