Help! Win shares on a different subnet?

I got my WD TV Live box today and I love it. Well, I loved it until I discovered something super strange. In a nutshell. Apparently windows share support relies upon netbios local broadcasts only. That’s fine for the average Joe who has all his stuff on one subnet. But here’s my situation which isn’t that uncommon you’d think…

My WD TV Live box is in my DMZ hooked up to router 1 (router 1 is hooked over fiber to the net and does tier 1 NAT). It’s on 192.168.0.0/24. So far so good, however all my TB of RAID-1 media is actually behind router 2 which is NAT’ed behind 192.168.0.0 and is on 192.168.1.0/24. Guess if the WD box can see the shares at all? Right. Basically, all it does is a NetBIOS broadcast on 192.168.0.0, can’t find any shares there and tells me to drop dead. Alright me thinks, let’s just configures WINS support on the WD box to point to the NAT’ed Windows box on 192.168.1.0 (port 137 UDP, and yes, I port forwarded the whole 13x range TCP/UDP as well as 445 TCP just in case) and case closed.

Surprise #1: No option in the UI to configure a WINS server? In 2012? Is this for real?

Jesus weeps I thought, but alright, there surely, certainly, must be a way to input a direct UNC path, y’know \192.168.1.100 style and force the WD box to read the shares from the Windows machine in question.

Surprise #2: No such option!! In 2012. Again.

So, I realise most users of this box run all their content either local from a USB disk or on same subnet shares, but the situation I’m describing is HARDLY niche. Please help. Unfortunately I have no control over router 1 to configure DHCP on Router 1 to give the WD box a specific WINS address.

Never heard of “Tier 1” NAT, so I’m not sure what that’s doing, but the necessity of using NAT at all inside your home network is extremely uncommon.

Heck, NAT aside, even having two subnets in a home network is pretty rare :slight_smile:

WINS support only adds Name Resolution across subnets …  it doesn’t provide for Master Browser discovery across subnets.

But to track your point, even WINS is horribly outdated… most systems made in the last 10 or 15 years now just default to using DNS for NetBIOS name resolution, and only use WINS if they get a negative response from DNS or local NBNS broadcasts.

At my company, we haven’t deployed a WINS server in YEARS, but we continue to support old ones because we have Windows NT boxes still online… 

Yes, your situation is VERY niche.

The use of direct UNCs is favorable in a lot of instances, but subnet broadcasts will work in the VAST majority of home networks…

Thanks, but that doesn’t really help? Anyway, my set up is the following - Ground flor: Entry point, Router 1, NAT/Firewall/Wi-Fi 1, 3 servers, TV, WDC box, then wire to 2nd floor → Wi-Fi router 2/NAT/Firewall and the media server. It’s very similar to this diagram:

http://nbfw.sourceforge.net/background.html

I very much disagree this is a niche set-up. Apart from the security benefit of two-layer isolation all you need for this (share the same net connection/wifi in a two story house) are two wi-fi routers, which by default results in 2-layered NAT (I can’t use the wi-fi on my 2nd floor DLINK DIR-655 if I just use it as a switch).

WINS is obsolete but still needed for NetBIOS traversal, ESPECIALLY with products which fail to support UNC addressing (looking at a particular product intently). Looking at the number of ‘it won’t see my shares topics here’  I think there’s a clear business need for UNC addressing support on these grounds alone.

Oh, and the WDC documentation nowhere says the box only supports same subnet shares.

I’ll to hack my way around by editing the lmhosts file on the Windows machine on NAT2, but if that fails I’m all out of ideas. Help?

I have three WiFi routers in my network – but they’re all in the same subnet… 

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Off-Topic-Discussions/Post-your-Net/m-p/175810#M143

All of my WiFi routers are connected as WiFi bridges.   They have to be to support seamless roaming between AP’s… Otherwise, if you roam from one AP to another, you must change subnets and all of your active connections will terminate.

I’m tellin’ ya…  I’ve been doing networks for over 2 decades… your setup is most definitely an unusual home network…  

But that’s OK.  I have no problem with high geek-factor…  I’m propellerheaded myself. :wink:  It may not be “niche” in certain circles, but for the generic home user, it sure is…

Oh, and the WDC documentation nowhere says the box only supports same subnet shares.

Of course not.   It’s not going to be an issue except for the 1 in 10,000 (or whatever miniscule percentage) of users who have multiple routed subnets in their home net… 

It also doesn’t say it doesnt’ do IPv6 or Socks Proxy, or IPSec tunnels, or Kerberos authentication … or any of the other myriad of highly specialized use cases… :wink:

Woa, and you say my set up is complicated :wink: Look, I’m a dentist man, my networking knowledge is based on user manuals and Wikipedia. I ain’t a geek, the only thing I want is to get my videos on screen!

This set up works for you as you have hubs/switches whereas my wi-fi router (like most) have their own switch which fortunately/unfortunately comes with NAT. AP roaming is probably nice but I never move with a laptop throughout the house so I don’t care much. In my situation I can either:

a) Buy a hub/switch to put before my second AP
b) Switch to NFS (which hopefully works)
c) Return the box which I probably won’t do as I otherwise love it

I actually do hope WD TV Live is IPv6 ready. Though it’s not advertised so I won’t hold WD liable. However if they advertise Windows shares support that means Windows shared support, not the half-baked, ‘hey I only work if on the same subnet-no-WINS-NetBIOS broadcast-only-UNC what is that?’ implementation which supposedly is what all the users need or want. Product management decicions, or engineering, fair enough their decisions my money. I’m majorly disappointed with this implementation, but I’ll just shut up and vote with my wallet next time. That said the, overall product rocks. So far.

Hopefully this discussion will be helpful to someone. Cheers

b)  NFS won’t work, either, becuse it depends on RPC broadcasts to discover NFS servers.   And no, you can’t specify an IP for that, either.  :cry:

I’ve never seen a WiFi router that can’t be connected as a bridge.  

The DIR-655 can be, too.

Just don’t use the INTERNET port on the 2nd router.

Connect like this:

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Thanks.

Hmm, I’ll give that a try - this is likely going to work, but I was afraid that with such config I’ll lose wi-fi on the bridged AP that way, which is critical. I’ll just have to give it at try though.

I tried NFS and it actually works! But. Only if your server advertises its exports - FreeNFS won’t work, HaneWIN will. You still have to set up port forwarding to 3 ports TCP/UDP, but otherwise no worries!

(Well, almost - the performance was really horrid but it turned out it’s my DIR-655 doing something weird, probably QoS. I bypassed it for now just for testing purposes, and the performance problem went away.

Well, note quite, as it seems now my powerline link between AP1 and AP2 can’t do better than approx. 4 MB/sec which is not enough for m2ts streams of 35Mbit/sec… Anyway these are completely different problems which have nothing to do with the WD box  ;-)

Cheers

Breach wrote:

… but I was afraid that with such config I’ll lose wi-fi on the bridged AP that way, which is critical

 

Cheers

Oh, two more suggestions:

If you DO want to be able to roam around your house,

– On BOTH APs:  Set the SSID and Security Settings and Credentials EXACTLY the same.   

– Choose DIFFERENT channels for both;   1 & 6, 6 & 11, or 1 & 11 for 2.4 GHz.

I tried NFS and it actually works! But. Only if your server supports advertises it’s exports -

FreeNFS won’t work, HaneWIN will. You still have to set up port forwarding to 3 ports TCP/UDP

but otherwise no worries!

Ahh!  That makes sense.   I guess the WD is doing an RPC SCAN of the subnet first, before it sends the export request. – The port forward would indeed make that work.  Good to know!

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Hmmm and I thought the SSID name did not determine router uniqueness (or maybe it doesn’t, but allows clients to seamlessly switch between different SSIDs). Good to know. I’ll give all this a try when I get home later tonight and I’ll let you know. 

Cheers.

Exactly right.

SSID = Service Set Identification.

Since you’re wanting your “whole home” to be in the same Service Set, then setting the SSIDs the same does that.

This prevents your WiFi clients from having to switch profiles when they move from one AP to the other, which will also terminate any active connections (particulary with TCP-based protocols.)

Setting unique SSIDs will prevent clients from roaming until the signal gets so weak that they drop connection, then they might pick up the other one. 

But the the ORDER of SSID’s defined on the client controls everything…  If the weak one is on the top of the list, your client will always prefer it, even if the signal is barely usable.

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 I’ve never seen a WiFi router that can’t be connected as a bridge.  

Thanks, this actually worked! And I got Wi-Fi too! I’m really happy as the WD box can finally see my WIndows shares… although I’ll probably continue to use NFS, as the performance seems better.

Just a small note, I had to manually disable the DHCP server on the bridged wi-fi AP - I was losing connectivity randomly until I finally realised there was a DHCPd war raging on between both routers :wink:

Thanks again and cheers!