I found my answer:
An overview of mounting a SMB/CIFS / Windows Network share with your xk3y.
I appreciate all the work that has gone in to this behind the scenes, it's worth making clear that this is not an officially supported feature, the options are there though and it works. Performance is now completely acceptable in my set up and has replaced USB storage
so anything that helps others, or at least makes them aware.. I think it's easy to miss this and the fact it works so well, if just looking over existing threads.
I'll try to provide a round-up of what you need to do, my experience with this, and tips for anyone trying to achieve the same.
To reiterate UglyClicker and inquam's input the required / new values you need to put in xkey.cfg are
xkey.cfg settings
CODE:
SHARE=//ip_here/share/path
USER=smb_user
PASSWD=smb_pass
A password is required, if you are sharing from Windows and your account doesn't have one I suggest adding one, it's the cleanest option. You can set up auto-login for a passworded account. You could instead create another account specifically for this purpose.
NetBIOS names don't work (thanks echoztrip). You can use either an IP or a name that will be resolved by DNS (you could add a record to a real domain, or a local DNS server).
Inside the share folder you need to have a folder called games, the same as with regular USB storage.
In xkey.cfg I've found I have to comment out SSID and ensure KEY=YOUR_DONGLES_UNIQUE_KEY is uncommented. Not doing the former results in the IP field being empty, the latter and it isn't returned at all (don't think a connection was initialised at all if memory serves). The share wasn't mounted in either case. I'm using Ethernet, obviously if you're *attempting* this over WiFi then configure accordingly.
I found that the share would only be picked up when I was using DHCP, setting a Static IP prevented the share from being loaded - my IP didn't show in About / data.xml either, the field was empty. I could still access the web interface at the assigned IP, however. Workaround for this was to set up IP-MAC binding / DHCP reservation (there is a page for this on most routers).
• How to set up DHCP reservation on a QNAP NAS
Hardware setup and performance
I have
CODE: SELECT ALL
xk3y -> Win7x64 bridge -> gigabit to router -> gigabit to NAS
I'm using a standard USB to Ethernet for Wii Adapter (ASIX AX88772, but could only find this out once it had arrived) from eBay. You can plug your Ethernet adapter straight into the xk3y USB dongle for a very neat solution. I wouldn't have thought there's any significant benefit to running gigabit here, beyond network capacity, especially as the adapter is 100Mb. Aside from the xk3y, server latency could be a bottleneck - if doing this from Windows and not getting performance you'd like I'd suggest making sure minimal software/services are running, the same as if you were burning XGD3. In use I'm very pleased with the speed, playing straight from the ISO (though I always install to hard drive, which I find much faster than loading from Share/USB/disc). On boot the Network OK message is followed immediately by the HDD Connected message and all 89 games on my share are instantly accessible. Actual throughput figures are the same as those recently reported by UglyClicker. I'm getting avg. 2.095 MB/sec to the xk3y (total throughput of 2.16 MB/sec). Some games play fine, others have noticeably extended loading times - though once loaded are fine (this may not be the case for GTA V for example); I suggest installing games to your Xbox.
Adapters that work
• (0B95:7720) ASIX AX88772
• ASIX AX88772A
Adapters that do NOT work
• ASIX AX88178
• ASIX AX88179
• ASIX AX88722B (AX88772B?)
• (0FE6:9700) USB 2.0 10/100M Ethernet Adaptor
TheArtificer wrote:You can use any supported Ethernet adapter, there's no lock down, you get access to Mr W's web interface as a bonus [..]
Supported chipsets:
Pegasus/Pegasus II (adapters compatible with Mac laptops are mostly these)
ASIX AX88xx (Wii USB Ethernet adapters)
Davicom DM9601 (USB1.1)
Davicom DM9620 (USB2.0)
Known issues
• Covers are not mounted from a share. Workaround for this. Fix for this, and share mounted www folder, expected in a future firmware release.
