You can use any of your existing users by adding -U <username> to the command.
Works on both old and new.
osmc@osmc:~$ smbclient -U james -L 192.168.0.25
Enter WORKGROUP\james's password:
Sharename Type Comment
--------- ---- -------
Apps Disk Applications
Backup Disk
eBooks Disk
Misc Disk
Movies Disk
Music Disk System default shared folder
NetBackup Disk System default shared folder
Photos Disk
TV Disk
IPC$ IPC IPC Service ()
SMB1 disabled -- no workgroup available
osmc@osmc:~$ smbclient -U james -L 192.168.0.22
Enter WORKGROUP\james's password:
Sharename Type Comment
--------- ---- -------
data Disk
misc Disk
IPC$ IPC IPC Service (Media server)
SMB1 disabled -- no workgroup available
Then you should be able to connect from Kodi using the James user.
alternatively can also use SMB with autofs
I’d take a look at the passwords.xml file I mentioned previously to make sure this is what is actually happening.
In passwords.xml it has:
osmc@osmc:~/.kodi/userdata$ cat passwords.xml
<passwords>
<path>
<from pathversion="1">smb://nas01/data</from>
<to pathversion="1">smb://james:<PASSWORD>@nas01/data</to>
</path>
</passwords>
So your Kodi source is setup using a hostname instead of an IP address? Did you try running that smbclient command from your Vero using the hostname to make sure you didn’t have a name resolution issue?
You might also try in Kodi going to Settings>Services>SMB and dropping the max protocol version to v2 in case there is some kind of an issue with negotiating the correct SMBv3 version.
The first 2 attempts at adding it, I used the IP address, so how that particular info ended up in passwords.xml I cannot say. Each time I simply tried to add the source via the Kodi interface.
I’m just thinking out loud here, given that I don’t want to actually add a source (I was only doing it to test that the connection would work) am I better to use autofs and then update the pathsubstitution?
I’m still not overly happy with using SMB as my understanding is performance on the Photos share won’t be as good as using NFS, but if that’s the only way… then I suppose it’ll have to do. Would it be correct then also, that I then set the ‘to’ path to the new smb mount?
That hostname doesn’t work, I’d have to add .lan to it. I’ve updated passwords.xml using nano to set it to the IP instead (as my primary NAS will always have that IP). How should I test if that’s working now? Or am I best just to follow the autofs guide, add it that way and once mounted test the dir contents show. Then once that’s done, update my pathsubstition path?
Performance shouldn’t really be an issue. NFS should be faster, but SMB on a V shouldn’t be that far behind and still comfortably faster than the bit rate of any file you would be streaming to it.
Adding a Kodi source isn’t going to hurt anything or mess up your current library as long as you don’t add a scraper to it (ie in content set “This directory contains” to “none”) and you can leave it or delete it as you wish. To test you just navigate to is via videos>files or settings>media>library>videos> and if you can browse and play from there then your good. To test a system mount you can just add a new source and point it to where you created the new mount point.
As for a system mount that should pose no issue once you get it working using path substitution to redirect to a local path. I cover that in the howto I had linked. It is basically just a ‘find and replace’ when Kodi follows a file path so as long as you set it up correctly to make the new path valid it should leave you with a working library.