My Book live kind of works, not found by Mac OS

Hey there,

I have a new 3TB My Book Live, and a MacBook Pro (Mac OS 10.6.7).

The drive never automatically appears in Finder (not even after rebooting either the My Book or the Mac). 

When I look up the IP address of the My Book in my router, I can then mount the drive (in Finder) using the IP address. I can also ssh to the drive. Both the Mac and the drive are on the same subnet (e.g., the Mac at 10.1.1.1, and the drive at 10.1.1.5). I can access the My Book admin web interface using the IP address (but not with a symbolic name). 

iTunes also does not see any server on my network. 

The green light on the drive is blinking. The situation is the same if I connect my Mac to my router using an ethernet cable (rather than using WLAN). 

Any ideas?

Thanks,

_Oliver_

You’re having name service issues.

Your router should be providing several basic services:

* DHCP - This service hands an IP address to a device that appears on the network and asks for one using a DHCP client.  The MBL has a DHCP client.  The DHCP server on the router will hand out not only an IP address, but also the network’s netmask, your network’s default route (to get to the Internet), and the IP addresses of the DNS servers.  It may also include things like the names or IP addresses of time servers, etc.

* DNS - This service simply translates names, such as google.com, into ip addresses, such as 74.125.226.80, and also the reverse.  I’ve seen several DNS implementations on routers.  Some routers simply forward the requests they get onto DNS servers at your ISP.  Some routers don’t handle DNS at all and simply pass the traffic to your ISP.  But more modern routers will not only forward traffic, but also provide local name service for your LAN.  When DHCP registers your client on the network, the client has an option to pass a name to the DHCP server.  The DHCP server takes this name and puts it and the IP address into the DNS server running on the router.  That way, you can resolve names on your internal network, such as mybooklive.

*NMB - This is Windows Networking Name Service, and one function it has is to maintain a “browse list” for systems hosting shares on the network.  There will be one master browser on the LAN somewhere.

Update: NMB is not normally provided by the router - but via an election process for Windows hosts in the workgroup.  You’re router is not involved in this unless it is hosting a Windows share, which some newer routers do.  Browsing is important for finding hosts using the Mac Finder.

For example, on my Linux system I can query the mybooklive and you can see for the workgroup “WORKGROUP” that the master browse list is hosted by “STUMP”, which is my Linux system.

mario@stump:~$ smbclient -L mybooklive -N
Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 3.2.5]

	Sharename Type Comment
	--------- ---- -------
	Public Disk Public Share
	IPC$ IPC IPC Service (My Book Live Network Storage)
Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 3.2.5]

	Server Comment
	--------- -------
	BROTHER-4040CDN      
	STUMP stump server (Samba, Ubuntu)
	MYBOOKLIVE My Book Live Network Storage

	Workgroup Master
	--------- -------
	WORKGROUP STUMP

Now on to your problem.

It would appear to me that one of two things is happening.  Either the router is not registering the name of the mybooklive with the DNS server on the router, or the MacBook does not have the DNS resolver configured correctly.

In the network settings for the Mac, the DNS entry (or entries) should be the IP address of the router.  This should have been assigned by the DHCP server when your Mac connected to the network.

The DHCP server on the router should be registering the mybooklive name and assigned IP address with the DNS server.  There’s often a setting for this.

To test whether this works, you should be able to resolve a name from your Mac.  If you make any changes to the router, the Mac, or the MBL, you’ll need to restart networking services on the Mac, and reboot the router and MBL.  Reboot the router first.

Here’s how you can do a lookup from the Terminal application on the Mac.  Note that the “Server” being used is the DNS server on my router, at 192.168.2.1.

mario@stump:~$ nslookup mybooklive
Server: 192.168.2.1
Address:	192.168.2.1#53

Name:	mybooklive.stargard.ca
Address: 192.168.2.147

M.

One thing that bugs me about this problem is that both the MBL and your Mac should be using mDNS, which is Multicast DNS.  This is an extension to DNS for local area networks.

It should “just work”.

Are you, perchance, blocking mulitcast on your router?

On DD-WRT, you’d find this check box here:

Ok, thanks for the explanation.
Yes, there are some issues with the name serving. In the router admin interface, I can see host names of all DHCP clients. My MacBook can resolve external host names, but none of the internal ones. It appears DNS requests are resolved (via router) using external DNS servers only.

There must be more to it than this, though: if I add name and IP of mybooklive to /etc/hosts on the Mac, the name can (obviously) be resolved. It still fails to appear in finder etc., so something else is not working in addition. I’ll try to find a way to properly fix the DNS first.

The good news (for me) is that the MBL is probably not the main problem.
Thanks!

Mmh ok. I hadn’t heard about multicast DNS before. I haven’t got access to my router right now, but I will check.

On your router it appears to be under the WAN settings, which I hadn’t touched on mine yet. (I didn’t expect the WAN settings to be part of the problem).
My router is a different one (older D-Link G604T), so I don’t know out of my head if it has a similar setting.

Thanks!