my brother in law is impressed by XBMC and wants to set up something similar for himself. However, he wants to have it set up remotely on his machine in his office (his internet has a dedicated IP address and then various machines connected to a router) that he can also access from his laptop at home. Now I have 2 schools of thought on this, the first is to have XBMC on the machine in the office that provides an interface over a web connection. However, he also wants to have the emulation games like mine does so that would be far too slow to achieve. The second option is a hell of a lot simpler in that I'd install XBMC and required plugins on his laptop but then just connect to the drives remotely. So - how so do I go about having XBMC do that. Is it possible to make a remote drive become a recognisable drive in Windows as you would a local network drive?

Before anyone asks, yes I'm fully aware of the constraints of such a set up which I will be going into with him but we're just dealing with the theory right now. Just so I can map a general idea in my head before I make any concrete plans.

Re: Setup a remote drive as a network drive in Windows?

Correct me if I'm wrong since I'm not a Windows expert, but I think the only way to do this, unless you are doing something really funky, is to share the drive out via Network Neighborhood / SAMBA etc. And you do not want to expose port 139 or whatever ports are used for Windows filesharing outside your firewall. Most Windows bugs / exploits etc rely on people doing this and it is a good way to get your PC haxored. Plus sharing this via the net, if it even will work, will probably be slow as balls.

Re: Setup a remote drive as a network drive in Windows?

[QUOTE=res0nat0r;890952]Plus sharing this via the net, if it even will work, will probably be slow as balls.[/QUOTE]

this will be the only reason not to do anything as far as anything related to media goes.

Re: Setup a remote drive as a network drive in Windows?

Yup I knew it was going to be a slow ass monkey. And the more I thought about it in the end I told him he'd be better off just getting an external drive that he could swap between the 2. Any idea I came up with was swiftly knocked back by terrible upload speeds.

Re: Setup a remote drive as a network drive in Windows?

there's things like this too...

[URL]http://www.mionet.com/[/URL]