If you are using a NAS, they typically have an embedded Linux. The only tricky part is finding out how to login as a root user to gain terminal access to the embedded Linux on your NAS box. This varies from NAS vendor to vendor. On Thecus, you can install a Sys module, and then an sshd module. Once you have both, you can use Putty to use SSH to login. Once you know how the raid is mounted, you have full control about how you organize your symlinks or hard links.
Unfortunately, it's not very easy to configure my Thecus N7000+ to support symbolic links with SMB. That's because they construct the smb.conf file at boot and service startup time from data that's in a readonly flash-based file system. Instead, what I've done is to use hard links. I have an "all" folder that has folders for all movies. In each movie folder I have a file called symlinks.txt that contains one or many relative paths representing additional paths (such as by letter and/or by genre). BTW, I found that if I named the file "symlinks", Mede8er would not play the folder since it found a file without a file extension and just said "Invalid file" without any further information about which file it was unhappy with. It was only by trial and error that I found out that is was a file without a suffix. Note to mede8er developers - improve error messages
On my NAS box, I have a shell script that validates the entries in the symlinks.txt file, and then uses cp -R -l (Google Unix cp manpage) to perform a recursive copy using hard links to each target file, creating new directories to mirror the directory structure. Note that Unix generally does not support hard links to directories. But the extyra space consumed by a new new directories is miniscule. I did this for my entire 400+ movie collection and had a script to iterate over all of them and set up the entire by_letter and by_genre organization. So on my video wall, it starts with 3 folders - one for all movies, one by letter, and one by genre.
2nd note to mede8er developers - I found that even though I had a valid folder.jpg in these folders, Mede8er ignored them. The only way I could use them was to copy them to a root folder named videowall on a USB flash drive that I have left plugged in the back of my Med400X. It would be nice if in the next firmware release that it just used the user-supplied folder.jpg at that folder location.
Note that Unix hard links
are safe, unlike Windows junction points. On Unix, a directory entry is essentially a reference to an iNode. The iNode represents the file and it keeps a reference count. Creating a hard link creates additional references to the iNode. Only when all the reference counts on an inode are zero will Unix delete the file. So if you delete what looks like a file in one of the movie directories in genre folders, it will not delete the file unless that was the last reference to the file. So in my case, unless I delete the files from the "all" folder and the by_letter and by_genre folders, I will never lose anything.
Windows Junction points are a nightmare. Even the Windows recycle bin doesn't understand them. It's very easy to delete files when you do not intend to do so.
As Insomniac rightly warned - beware unless you know what you're doing.Hope this helps for those of you using NAS boxes.
Kind regards,
David.
