Vista and Samba Won’t Play. or, Thanks Again Micro$oft.
So for the time being I am running a my media center on Vista. Yes yes… I’m sad about it too. It’s a compromise that I’m considering how to fix. Possible solutions include PS3 connecting to media server (not 100% solution), An X86 running OS X and XP (This is most likely at the moment, or giving up good 3D and going with a Mac Mini since Apple doesn’t make the hardware I want. Make me a mini with decent 3D and I’ll buy it Steve, really…
Anyway… Lots of storage on the good old gigaQube, which is now running Debian (gotta update the page I know) which Vista needs to connect to so we can have all that media goodness. XP works, Macs work, everything works ‘cept of course… Vista. Vista won’t connect to the gigaQube’s Samba shares. Surprise surprise eh? Turns out that MS decided to default Vista to NTLMv2 and refuse all other authentication types. For some reason this wasn’t obvious in the qube’s logs. Anyway this breaks compatibility with a whole bunch of cheap NAS devices using embedded Linux and Samba, as well as my fairly recent version of Samba on the qube. Good news is you can tell Vista to stop this nonsense. Instructions here: http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4434907782.html Or you can upgrade to Samba 3.0.2.something which does support NTLMv2.