Hi, this issue has been raised in the past in the thread “Ethernet blinking while off” from 03/21/2012 but I can not reply to that thread.
This morning my WD box has been doing the same, flooding my network for at least 1 hour causing my broadband router to repeatedly reboot itself. Unplugging the WD box stopped the network traffic and my network has been stable since then.
Note that this wasnt just the occasional ping, it was continually saturating my network. No hard disks attached and the box was in standby. This happened once before a few months ago. Is it possible it is trying to index the contents of my laptop over the network? Why is it using broadcast to do that? Is there any way to disable this, otherwise I will have no option but to unplug the WD box when not using it. I have the latest FW but this previously happened with an older version of the FW.
I’ll tell you the same thing I told the OP of the other thread.
Broadcasts are a normal part of networking.
as to whether it’s a “flood,” or that it’s “saturating” the network, that’s a whole different question, and you can’t know that it’s a flood or that it’s coming from the WDTV unless you’ve captured the packets with a packet analyzer (like wireshark) and have determined what it is.
If it’s actually Broadcast traffic, then no, it’s not related to scanning your laptop. Library scans are Unicast, not Broadcast-based.
… and whether or not it is the WDTV, the issue is your router. Even if the WDTV is spewing dirt, your router should not be rebooting. a router rebooting as a result of receiving any type of packet (malformed or normal) means your router is vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks; a very bad security flaw.
thanks for the reply. I accept that the router should not reboot, but this is supplied ‘locked down’ by my ISP, there isn’t much I can do about that.
This has happened twice now, both times unplugging the WD box immediately ceased the traffic, so while this isn’t conclusive it seems to suggest the WD box was the source of the traffic. There was certainbly far more traffic than I would expect if it was simply looking for content to index. If it happens again I will try to grab some info with wireshark.
