this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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oh I am clever o so clever. Centralised kodi symlinks w00t w00t
Context?
I'm converting some machines to kubuntu. However, dolphin is a bit of a bitch with winserver shares and auth, and it fucks me off having goddamn cifs hardcoded mounts to shares in fstab.
NERD
So i've spun up a tiny alpine vm called malcolm that basically just mirrors the winshares as nix shares.
Then His Lordship wanted a mini media player for the brewery. I have a pc300 that's perfect for that, so slapping libre/kodi on it. Of course, as detailed previously, i refuse to name MY tv shows on MY file server to please the machine. I use human names. Previously i'd written a script to symlink the movies / anime / tv shows on a winbox so i could rename the symlinks and have kodi (with a netflix skin) do its thing, but of course i don't want to do that for every farking machine and you can't share symlinks on a winbox as they're kernel-specific.
But linux treats symlinks more like shortcuts.....and you can share them.
So more scripting - linux this time - and i have a centralised Kodi share on Malcolm that is named for Kodi. The script - which i'm Working out how to run when the source directory changes - creates two copies of the dir in symlink form. One is parity (if contents of server/show matches this, ignore), the other is Recently_Added (new stuff) that i then rename with filebot and move to kodi/tv_shows.
So the script runs through, checks if there's anything new in /server/tv, if yes, then create a symlink copy in parity, and one in recently_added that i then manually name for Kodi to parse.
It also hunts and kills dead symlinks on the /mnt/kodi dir :)
I'm glad I understood most of that lol
You've given me an idea, for which I'm grateful. I've been dragging my feet on properly utilising these server hard drives full of shows and stuff.
Much appreciate :)
New fileserver? Always an idea :)
(My fserve doesn't run anything but shares and i like it that way)