Sure this must have come up before, but did a search and couldn’t find anything
I would like to see PLEX allow me to enter the UNC network path for my media, and handle any credential requirements itself. Currently, it does not have the facility to enter a username / password for a network share.
I know there a couple of workarounds, but these are either not always practical/possible, or not very secure.
The proper way to do it, IMHO:
All shares you want Plex to access must have a common user account with a password.
You could create one especially for Plex and give it minimal privileges for increased security.
Create a user account with the same name and password on your server machine.
Then let Plex server run as a system service, under this very user account.
UNC paths can already be entered into the ‘add folder’ dialog in the library configuration. Just browsing to the shared folder is not supported.
This works. I use it excactly like that.
The above is nice in an ideal world, but not always an option to match login details - not to mention the fact I can’t get that approach to work against my synology nas anyway (but that’s for another thread).
Any yes, entering UNC paths isn’t the issue here, it’s being able to then enter the login credentials (ala Kodi)
Currently, I’m running it against an unprotected Guest account, which I’ve set to read-only, which then has a knock-on impact on some other programs running which needs write access.
@ottkerner: and that only works in windows I assume. As if you install the server, the user gets created automaticly and I cant see tha password for that one. On all my server and NAS there is one user which is the same and has the same password. But that does not help, when I put in the UNC path in the library. it does not see the content as you cant verify it with the login and password.
Until now I was under the impression that
most of the NAS appliances have a configuration option where one can set some user accounts for the SAMBA server of the NAS.
Those user accounts are commonly also used for the other features of the NAS, and are therefore not necessarily found in the SMB configuration but in the ‘general’ part of the config menu.
Here is the appropriate section for D-Link NASs as an example:
https://support.bluesound.com/hc/en-us/articles/200237168-D-LINK-NAS-SMB-Setup
Early 2021 clean-up: duplicate
as pointed out above… this should however be configured on the OS level (mounting the share, then access it “locally” by the Plex server)
