Mountable Samba partition

[dyinman]

I have been working on this off and on for a short while, but can't quite seem to get past a hump.

The goal is to provide a bios which supports mounting a network drive, most notably a samba share (for easy and widely available access).

Imagine that... a centralized gaming server (would obviously work better on a large lan than a wan) in which whoever is modded with this bios can enter in the network settings of the location they want to mount as a physical drive. The result would be the ability to load a game and play it when the game is stored in a remote location!

I personally would consider that an awesome feature of maybe the next version. Do you think TeamXecuter here can pull it off?

I'd love to find out

 

[Conundrum]

I second that....if possible it would be a great feature (as long as it could be password protected)....I've wanted a BIOS or app that could do that for a while now.

 

[HarshReality]

I mount my network shares through XBMC, not had problem one and the network shares are all password protected. Some would call it an app, however I use it as my dashboard.

 

[wolrahnaes]

It is not, and never will be, possible to run a game off a network share. Besides the obvious issues of network latency and speed, the big problem is that the games have control over the network port once loaded. The only way to do what you want would be to have the dashboard download the game from a server to your hard drive before running it, and that would just be so slow it's worthless to bother with.

It would be nice to be able to have a bunch of thin-client Xboxes that are no more than a motherboard and modchip running off a central server, but it's not going to happen.

 

[Conundrum]

re:

I'm not saying to run a game off a network share, I'm simply saying to be able to samba into the xbox to modify files, copy/delete files on the xbox etc (same as I I can with a Windows PC).

The Xenium has it in it's OS, so hopefully a working samba server can be built someday as a small xbox app (till then I'll just use ftp).

And the for the other poster, XBMC is a samba client not a samba server (in that yes XBMC can view files on a samba/windows share, but you cannot go "\\myxbox" in windows and access your drive that way (unless you are running linux on the xbox)).

 

[bertrajs]

Just a thought :
http://www.mite.cz/webasdisk-en/webasdisk-en.html
We just have to wait for the gigabit version

 

[Nokiatone5]

hey harsh, is that MY ip and MY isp / etc. on ure screenie?!?! lol

B|aCk0uT.

 

[dyinman]

Besides the obvious issues of network latency and speed, the big problem is that the games have control over the network port once loaded.

Yes, if you were to access a samba share from an .xbe, like XBMC... but what I'm talking about is loading the SMB protocol from the bios. Once that is accomplished, you could mount the samba share as an actual drive and be assigned to a drive letter. That would resolve the issue of the Xbox games "taking over" the port. Although this would cause a performance issue when in lan multiplayer modes, I would think it'd definitely be worth it. The largest hit in performance I think one would notice is the LOADING of the game. Please bear in mind the XBox reserves plenty of cache for loading it's apps and games. Therefore it doesn't not matter so much the speed of the network when you are actually playing, it is more the loading of the game.

So, with that in mind, I stand by the fact that this is still very possible.

The bigger problem to keep in mind is how would you be able to FIT all of this in a bios in the space provided on average modchips?