Using a shared network drive in WinMX

[Terry Turner]

Hi all! First post here, so be easy on me...

Our family's music collection -- around 35GB in .mp3's and growing -- is stored on a network server hard drive. (The server wears a lot of hats, but placing the music there for all to share has saved me from buying and installing four or five new hard drives!) I'm the only WinMX user at the moment, but all my music is also now on the server's hd.

At the moment, I'm storing my incoming files in a "temporary" folder on my desktop, the contents of which I regularly transfer to the network drive as I get time. But the music files I want to share don't show up over the WinMX network -- that is, only the first 30 or so (of several thousand) files show up when I "browse" myself from a chat room. (This may explain why my uploads have essentially stopped lately!)

I searched the forum and I've seen this subject discussed briefly once before, but I'm wondering if an available guru might find the time to post with some details on how I might set up my home network to be able to save and share files to and from a remote drive.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[SamSeeSam]

Go to c>program files
and delete the winmx folder and reinstall winmx from here
Perhaps your library.dat got crrrupted or something.

Were they working properly before? [from this line "(This may explain why my uploads have essentially stopped lately!)" I take that they were working before]

Cheers

[Me Here]

I dont think reinstalling Sam will fix this issue..

WinMX doesnt like to share from or to a external drive.. its very picky.. it does however work better sharing from then storing to..

The most important part is making sure that the files are in a folder on the drive.  Files with a raw path or directly on the X:\File name here are not going to be l iked one bit by WinMX, so for example
X:\Folder to share\files here

Make sure thats the case with all of your files.

Next what are the file types.. WinMX will not share files that are .wma or .wmv by default and there are good reasons for this.  Converting them or re ripping is best but if you are not worried about personal information imbedded in them about you being shared then you can force WinMX to share those by going to Settings > Library > New File types and add them.

Try this .. let me know what files types you have..and post back Terry

[KM]

not an external drive, a network drive

and i always share from a network drive (exclusively), winmx deals with network drives fine (although one warning: on v3.54 winmx may pause for 2-3 seconds every now and then as the library refreshes, on a local drive it's not noticeable but a network share has added delay)

the only problem winmx has as mentioned is it won't let you share a drive letter directly, however if you use a subdirectory it should work fine, or you can just share the network share directly (browse to the share, not the mapped drive) to get around the problem

as for only seeing 30 or so files... do you have the network storage shared on winmx properly? or is it just sharing the temporary directory with those 30 files in it? which directory are those shared files showing from?

[MarlenasMan]

Hi all! I'm Terry Turner, the one who started the thread -- I have since joined WinMx World.

As it turns out, the problem had nothing much to do with sharing from a network drive after all! As KM can testify, WinMx is quite happy to share to and from a network drive. My error (there's no such thing as a 'computer error,' right?) was that I had not set a static IP for my console system. It's a long story, but WinMx was simply looking in the wrong place for my files. To make matters even worse, I had used my router's handy 'default' option of setting BOTH the UDP and TCP ports to the same number; WinMx doesn't like that. Once I corrected these things, my worries were over.

I did NOT have to open any ports specific to my server, as I've read elsewhere I'd have to do. That being the case, am I correct in assuming that, when uploading to another user, for example, my file is traveling via network cable from the server to my console, then back out to my router/modem and into the wild blue? Would it be better/more efficient, and is it even possible, to open ports to/from the server directly?

Thanks so much for all the great input!

[KM]

winmx uses an API function to open a file and read from it, it simply asks windows to open a file, windows opens it and gives back a handle pointing to the open file, then winmx asks to read from (/write to for downloads) that file

when that file is on a local drive windows accesses the file from the hard drive and returns that data back to winmx, when that drive is located over a network windows automatically reads the file from the network and returns it to the program - winmx doesn't even know it is a network drive (although it would be possible for it to check if it wanted to, but it doesn't check as there is no need to)

so no, allowing others to access the network share is not required, as they are downloading from winmx, not reading from the hard drives (the fact winmx gets the data from a hard drive before reading it is irrelevant to the other end, winmx could be making up the file as it goes along if it wanted to) - and for security reasons it's not recommended that you allow others to access it

and winmx should work perfectly fine with TCP and UDP set to the same port, the only time I've ever heard of people saying they can't are where they say "yes but the same port can't be open twice therefore i assume it wouldn't work" - TCP and UDP are separate, and many (in fact most) p2p applications by default use the same port for UDP and TCP, winmx is the only one that uses different default ports for each (no idea why, in most cases with a router forwarding both protocols on 1 port is much simpler than doing 2 port forwarding's, and without a router it's irrelevant)

btw my test systems all use the same port for TCP and UDP (the windows 98 test system uses TCP and UDP on port 98, the 2000 test system is port 2000, etc)... they also all share the files over the network

not setting static IP addresses shouldn't be a problem *in most cases* (my test systems... yes, they all use DHCP to get an IP Address automatically... lol), however when it renews the lease on the IP Address (to keep it up to date) it may cause a temporary network outage for a second or two, which won't effect winmx (the Internet is unreliable, data goes missing all the time...) however the file sharing in windows is not designed for the Internet, it is designed for a nice fast LAN with perhaps a single hub or switch in the middle with all of the data that gets sent arriving at the other end in the order it was sent and without delay, so if the lease time is too low then those brief 2 second outages happening to both systems all the time may cause some small issues

but I'd say the sharing from the wrong place would be the biggest reason for the fact that it wasn't sharing all of the files rather than the port numbers or static IP addresses or anything like that glad you got it all fixed and working though