travis' brain dump

Now most of you have no idea what that means and for those that don’t, just stop reading here because you’re going to have a headache probably… However, I’m sure to anyone who has come across this via a google search you’re in hopes of discovering a method to being able to access media stored on your Windows 2003 Server using your XBOX 360 Media Center Extender. I hope that this is the last place you have to look for the solution.

Honestly I was getting pretty frustrated. It seemed everyone’s solution to the problem was to use login scripts and setup permissions all over the place when at the end of the day when you had tried so many of those… 80% of the time it doesn’t work. I know this was very frustrating for me as nothing was working for me and nothing provided a perfect solution for *BOTH* Media Center and the streaming during gameplay using Windows Media Connect through WMP11.

So with some work and some thought, I came up with a solution last night which is working PERFECTLY for both Media Center *AND* WMC.

Here’s the thought process that got me to this theory… how does one make a local drive out of a network share? I don’t mean a mapped drive, I mean a full on, seen by Vista (or XP MC2005) honest to goodness hard disk without actually having it installed? iSCSI. 🙂

After doing some digging around on google, I was able to find several vendors out there (some free) that carried iSCSI Target software that could map local hard drives to iSCSI shares. I’m currently doing some testing with a couple of them but my first attempt actually backed up my theory right off using a trial version of RocketDivision’s StarWind. Windows Vista Ultimate comes with Microsoft’s iSCSI Initiator, so there was nothing to install for me on the client side. If you’re running a version of Windows that doesn’t have it, click the link and it should take you to their download. So far, so good. Now to just find something that will work that doesn’t cost my first born. 🙂 My hopes are that Nimbus will release a new version of their MySan product which will work with Windows Server 2003 SP2 since their current version only works on SP1 w/ .NET 2.0. Not downgrading just to test so here’s hoping to a quick release of 1.0 which I was told in a support ticket should be “very soon”.

The nice thing about iSCSI, as any server administrator who has a SAN knows, it links up at bootup so the drive is available system-wide and not limited to just one profile.

At this time, since I stated I’m testing, I’m unable to type up any instructions but I just wanted to blog out that there was a solution that is solid. As soon as I’m done I’ll post up with some instructions.

There is hope! 🙂