There have been several threads here discussing issues concerning network connections, particularly windows shares. I experienced problems myself with my 3 week old box, suddenly the network would not be available, I’d be watching a programme and on pressing the stop button, up a box would pop, “your network source is unavailable would you like to select another” happened a few times.
Having digested the other threads I dropped windows shares and went over to Linux shares. My network consists of a windows 8 laptop (wireless), windows 7 desktop (wired), WD Mybooklive NAS (wired), Samsung TV (wireless) and the WDTV SMP (wireless). I installed hanewin NFS server on the desktop to enable Linux shares. For 2 weeks I have been watching programmes without problems over the network using the WDTV SMP.
Today I wanted to transfer 50Gb of files from the HDD attached to the WDTV to my desktop, using windows shares over the network. After 17Gb the network connection was lost. All other devices were on line and functioning fine, none had gone off line while the files were being transferred.
I could see in my router config that the WDTV had lost its IP address. The router could see the MAC address of the WDTV but no IP address was assigned. I rebooted the router, It successfully issues IP addresses to all devices on the netowork except for the WDTV SMP. All windows shares were still available to the TV and the other devices. I must add that the WDTV SMP was in standby during all this.
I had to hard reboot the WDTV SMP to get the network connection back.
Anyone any thoughts on what is causing just the WDTV SMP to loose its network connection and no other device?
edit: restarted the copy process, after 15GB this time the connection was lost, all other devices functioning on the network apart from the WDTV. Same symptoms as before. The only solution reboot the WDTV again…
The signal strength is good not excellent but it has not lost a connection in 2 weeks when using Linux shares for streaming, yet within an hour of using the windows shares to transfer files it goes down… Its the only device using the 2.4GHz network and no other computer network devices in the area. I used a prog on my laptop to check when I installed the network in oreder to position the router optimally. My other devices are on the 5GHz network.
As a side note my other WDTV Live for which this is a replacement was an earlier model, the one before they had wifi included, I had to add a USB wireless adaptor to connect that to my network. That never lost a network connection in all the years I used it. Same location, same network devices as now.
I attempted top transfer files again with the WDTV on and not just in stand-by and mapped the share using the network name. After just over 10Gb of data transfer, connection lost.
Restarted the WDTV and as you suggested I mapped the share using the IP address and not the network name. Transferred 25Gb without problems, maybe that is the answer to network sharing problems? It would be interesting if you could map windows shares on the WDTV using IP addresses. That is the way it works for the Linux shares so is that significant?
thanks for the link, I will see how it proceeds, I have only had the unit 3 weeks (got it cheap as the new version came out 75US$) so reluctant to flash homebrew firmware and have no experince of Linux/Unix/NFS networking. Maybe when I can get into it may give it a try! But thanks.
