iPod and remote filesystems

I just got an iPod delivered, and I was trying to sync it with the iTunes running on my iBook running iMacOSX (uhh -- I mean MacOSX). All the mp3s on my local hard drive transfer just fine, but the mp3s on my Samba server that are listed in iTunes and play properly there generate an error dialog that says ``Attempting to copy to the disk ``iPod'' failed: because an unknown error occurred (-36).'' The Samba server is mounted over 802.11b using the built-in SMB support in MacOSX, and, as I said, they play just fine from within iTunes. Only in trying to copy them to the iPod do they fail. Anyone seen a similar problem?

My guess is that the SMB support isn't completly transparent. I bet if you had a netatalk mount point it would work okay.

Then again ... maybe not.

Greg

hmmmm
I created an apple share on my w2k server then mounted it on my Mac. I just installed OSX and was thinking of using samba. Sounds like there are a few problems.

I'm curious. Does the iPod allow you to take mp3s off the device? Or only the file-taxied items?

Calvin

Doesn't look like it, but that's a non-issue for me.

[iTunes doesn't grok mp3s found over Samba] Anyone seen a similar problem?

In a word, yes. We ended up copying the mp3s to a local disk a few Gb at a time in order to stick them on my iPod.

Beautiful hardware design, but they should have come to us for the software

Peter

Aargh. I've got way more mp3s than can possibly fit on my iBook (the only Mac I have with Firewire), or, for that matter, any Mac I have. This means that I've got to copy files all over the place when I want to update the iPod. Nuts. At least I discovered that I can just drag the files directly to the iPod within iTunes and avoid having them be in iTunes' library.

Hey, I just found out that the iPod syncs properly with NFS filesystems, so if you're using Samba (as opposed to a Windows server), you should be able to export that filesystem as NFS as well (making sure to allow connections from ports above 1023), and sync it that way. That's some seriously flaky SMB support.

Edit: Turns out that despite the fact that I allowed ports above 1023 to connect to my NFS server, it's still not working right. Works okay if I supply a `-P' option to my mount_nfs command in MacOSX, but that's a real pain. Gonna see if I can figure out how the MacOSX automounter works.

Edit again: Check out this automount NFS doc. It worked for me. You don't really need to edit the machines NetInfo stuff unless you don't have another name service running.

Gonna see if I can figure out how the MacOSX automounter works.

Search for a util call NFSManager on www.versiontracker.com. Makes NFS (including automounting) under OS X dead easy. Only problem I have with it is that sometimes it's activate changes menu does not work and you have to reboot for the changes to take affect.

-Mike

It doesn't seem to be on VersionTracker anymore (oddly, since I'd heard of it before from there), but I found it. Looks like it just automates what I did, which isn't that hard, once you know what to do. Thanks for the info, anyway, though.