"File not found" error when playing NAS media via Home Sharing

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If you are using a NAS drive to store your iTunes media, you may get a "File not found" error when trying to access content via Home Sharing and when running iTunes under iHomeServer, but no error when running iTunes interactively.

This can happen if you have mapped network drives and added content from those mapped network drives to iTunes.

The problem is that these mapped network drives are made available to your interactive desktop by Windows explorer.  When iTunes runs interactively, explorer.exe is running in the same session as iTunes and therefore iTunes can see these network locations.  When iTunes is run by iHomeServer, it is run in a background session dedicated to Windows services.  This session does not run explorer.exe and therefore does not have access to the mapped network drive letters.

The simplest way around this is to use fully qualified UNC file naming conventions when adding media to iTunes or when setting up Watched folders in iHomeServer.  For example, instead of adding content from your f:\ (mapped to \\mynas\media), add it directly from the UNC path \\mynas\media.

The ability to set up mapped drives for iHomeServer iTunes instances may be added in a future version, if there is sufficient demand - so please let us know your thoughts!

Oct30

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11/8/2011 9:43:50 AM #

Jan

Hi!

Would really, rally love this feature as it would allow me to use ihome server on my server which is using Drive Bender for backup /drive pooling.

//Jan

Jan Sweden | Reply

12/30/2011 6:21:21 AM #

Ed

Hi Jan,

Just to follow up on this - we did try to put network drive letter support into iHomeServer v2.  We managed to get the service itself to map network drives at startup which allows iTunes to see the drives just fine.  However, unfortunately, it was just not stable enough for us to keep this functionality in.  Windows would spontaneously stop authenticating to the mapped drive letter or would just deny access.

After further research, it is highly not recommended for services to access resources across mapped drive letters.  Microsoft do not support this with IIS (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257174) and recommend against this in custom code - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/180362

What we have done in iHomeServer 2 is ensure that when you create a Watched Folder, you can only select local drives or enter UNC filenames to avoid confusion.  Accessing networked resources via UNC paths should be feasible in all scenarios and is much safer.

If your networked media resources require authentication, try setting up a username and password on the remote machine that is identical to the one you are running iTunes under on your server.  For example, if iTunes is running under WHS2011\Administrator with the password 'fred', and is trying to access a NAS media folder, then create an account on your NAS drive called Administrator with password 'fred'.  Then set up a watched folder within iHomeServer using a UNC path to the NAS folder.  This should provide seemless authentication and allow iTunes to see all your media.

Ed United Kingdom | Reply

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