Trouble accessing Win7 shares with my WDTV

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

I have a Win7 box acting as a file server, and have a folder containing videos that I want the WDTV to access.

The WDTV can log in to the Win7 box using my credentials, and see the entire collection of all my data.

I don’t want to give the WDTV my name and password for the whole machine, I want the WDTV access limited to the just “Video” folder.

So I created a new user on the Win7 machine: “WDTV”, password=password.

I shared the Video folder as “Videos” granting user “WDTV” full R/W access.

I verified that other PCs can see the “Videos” folder on the network, but cannot access it (because they don’t have the correct credentials for that share)

I cleared the login info on the WDTV, and supplied it with the new user “WDTV” and “password”.

The WDTV can log in now, and sees the “User” folder that Win7 created for the new user, but it cannot see the shared “Video” folder, which it should have access to.

I triple-checked all the account credentials, no problems.  (And since the WDTV can see the user folders, that’s verified)

What is going wrong?

2

I’ll try to help, but since I don’t know how “new” you are at this, excuse me if I get too elementary for you.

>>>>   I don’t want to give the WDTV my name and password for the whole machine,

You won’t, because you share only the folders you want shared/seen.  It is not good practice to set up a windows share for a whole computer HD  (e.g. C: )  My PC has certain folders on C drive shared by Windows that have media in them, videos, music, photos, then three drives on the PC that have media only in them, and then I do share the entire drive/or main folder on drive.  In no case do I (or anyone) see a Documents folder on C: or anything else not shared.  And, if it was shared, only media files in it would appear to WDTV and not the whole enchilada.

>>>>   The WDTV can log in now, and sees the “User” folder that Win7 created for the new user, but it cannot see the shared “Video” folder, which it should have access to.

Well, it seems it should see the shared folder if you go into the WD menu via Video/Network shares/ to PC/ and shared folder on that PC called Videos, and then into any subfolders in the main shared Videos folder.

If this is what you are doing, and don’t see what you are looking for, then perhaps Windows and/or WDTV will not let you share (or access) this way.

As for how I do this, I do not use usernames and passwords on WDTV to access my shares.  I have no reason to, because the only folders accessible to WDTV are the shared media folders I set up so we all can easily access any of our music, videos and photos I shared via Windows

A while back, I wrote up a tip of how to configure sharing on WDTV to use, or not use, usernames and passwords.  See the first post at this link:

http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Streaming/How-to-resolve-quot-Network-shares-quot-access-problems-with/td-p/671513

Even if you want to use passwords, try what you are wanting to do by using no passwords at first to see what happens at the WDTV.

3

PGrace wrote:

 

So I created a new user on the Win7 machine: “WDTV”, password=password.

I shared the Video folder as “Videos” granting user “WDTV” full R/W access.

Which user account were you logged on to when you shared the Video folder? I’m just checking because if you were still logged on to your normal account that you don’t want to give the WDTV access to, then I don’t think that sharing a folder from that account will also share it from the new WDTV account that you created.

If you haven’t already, log on to the WDTV user account on your PC, and try sharing the videos folder from there.

I hope that helps.

4

I am very experienced with Windows.

  1. I don’t share my whole machine, but I have shared user “Paul” at the data directory level for other (I don’t want to share 4,500 directories individually) reasons unrelated to WDTV.  Giving WDTV those credentials gives anyone using the WDTV access to the entire Paul data tree, which would be a high security risk, so I only do that for testing.  The WDTV can get to my video files that way, so there is no unexpected problem, hardware or Win 7.  It’s just a security issue.  I shared “Video” for the user “WDTV”.

2)  I set up “WDTV” as a standard user on the Win 7 machine, and shared only the video folder, and that is what does NOT work.  The WDTV can (as it should) see the “USERS” and “WDTV”  folder (which are shared by default, but have only the standard Win7 OS subfolders)
It cannot see “Videos” which it specifically has been granted rights to access.

The only differences between accessing are A) “Paul” is an administrator but “WDTV” is a standard user.  B) "Videos is located in the “Paul” data tree, so “WDTV” has to look for the share, instead of looking at its own tree (but it should know how, because that is what file sharing is…looking outside your own tree…

5

ronmaz wrote:

 

Which user account were you logged on to when you shared the Video folder? I’m just checking because if you were still logged on to your normal account that you don’t want to give the WDTV access to, then I don’t think that sharing a folder from that account will also share it from the new WDTV account that you created.

 

If you haven’t already, log on to the WDTV user account on your PC, and try sharing the videos folder from there.

 

I hope that helps.

 

Okay, that’s interesting…
I was logged in as “Paul” when I shared my “Videos” folder for the user “WDTV”.  When I log in as user “WDTV” and find “Videos” on the network, it’s there, but Win7 says I don’t have permission to access the folder.
I can’t share the folder while logged in as “WDTV” because I don’t have access to it, even though “Paul” has granted access to “WDTV”.

6

OK, log back in as Paul and delete the Videos folder, or rename it to something else, Videos Paul?

Now log in as WDTV and create a new folder called Videos and share that.

I know this seems like a lot of fiddling about, but if you don’t want to share your Paul account with the WDTV, then a bit of extra work is involved.

7

That sort of works, but I can’t access the WDTV Videos folder when I’m logged in as “Paul” which is of course the main user of the machine–and all my scripts and batch processing for moving files would have to be rewritten, and moving a terabyte of movie files…

The point of sharing is to let others share your files, not to require you to log in as them…and in the real world they might not be willing to turn over their password.

At any  rate, it seems more like a windows sharing stupidity than WDTV specifically.  Too much security is useless…

Thanks for your help–It identified the problem, and I’ll figure out what I want to do about it.

8

  moving a terabyte of movie files…

When I have that much data to deal with, I do not move it to drive through the WDTV/network.  I eject the drive, connect it to PC, and copy away much quicker.  Basically, if a file takes an hour or less to move through the network (my gigabit Network) I do it, otherwise off comes the drive for mass quantity of data.  When I first set things up, I put fully populated 2TB drives on the WDTV.  After a while it all got cataloged and all was ready to go.

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It’s not a portable drive, and I don’t want the files accessible only to user “WDTV” anyway.

I want to share them to WDTV, not be owned by WDTV.