Continued Network Share problems : Only seeing one of my 4 pc's in Network Shares

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

I am now only seeing one of my 4 pc’s in Windows 7 network shares.  This has not happened for months when I downgraded my firmware back to 1.16.13 from 2.01.86

I am running firmware 1.16.13 and made sure that none of my WDTV Lives were the Master Browser. I checked that only one of the 4 pc’s is the Master Browser.  

I’m pretty confused right now since I thought this is totally new to me with 1.16.13

2

Ok.   I cycled the entire system and my shares are showing up.  

  1. I cold powered down the WDTV’s

  2. I shut down the 4 Windows boxes

  3. I recycled the router 

  4. I rebooted the router

  5. I rebooted 3 of the 4 Windows boxes (no logic here except that I want to add some hardware to this 4th box sometime tonite or tomorrow so I left it off)

  6. I rebooted all the WDTV’s 

Voila - and the shares are working again.  

 

Now here’s the kicker … could this be causing the problem

I noticed today that two Windows boxes were master browsers. So I changed the registry so one of the two would be an auto Master Browser (if there were no Master Browser already in my Windows Network). Then I did the full power down and power up of the WDTVs, the computers and the router. 

3

JRFishman wrote:

I noticed today that two Windows boxes were master browsers. 

OOooo.  That’s absolutely a problem.    By definition, there can’t be two masters.

But I have seen that happen, too…    What’s happening is that one PC did not receive an answer from the other when the master was queried, so the PC started an election.

Then one of two things happened:

  1- PC A won the election but PC B refused to relinquish the master role (rare!)

  2- PC A won the election because it still didn’t hear PC B during the election

4

“made sure that none of my WDTV Lives were the Master Browser”

I periodically lose shares, meaning I can see some folders from a pc but not all.  The only way to recover is to turn of the SMP completely for a few minutes.  I know that the SMP becomes the master browser sometimes.

Is there a way to prohibit the SMP from becoming the master browser?

5

Same darn thing happened an hour ago.  

I went to Network Shares and suddenly the Shares started being removed from the selection list.  Once again, I turned off my 3 WDTV SMPs and my pc’s.   

Everything is fine again but this is an unacceptable solution.  

6

JRFishman wrote:

Everything is fine again but this is an unacceptable solution.  

 

 

Get used to it, WDTV is a fickle [Deleted - Trancer] when it comes to networking.  Either live with it or swap it for another device that is not so “network challenged”. 

 

The WDTV is getting a little long in the tooth and I would not expect them to fix this rendition of WDTV.  Whether they throw in the towel or take another stab at this market via a new product  remains to be seen.

 

 

7

Get used to it, WDTV is a fickle woman when it comes to networking.  Either live with it or swap it for another device that is not so “network challenged”. 

 

The WDTV is getting a little long in the tooth and I would not expect them to fix this rendition of WDTV.  Whether they throw in the towel or take another stab at this market via a new product  remains to be seen.

Here’s one thing that I’m wondering. Can these authentication errors or lost servers be due to DNS.  I mean I use Samba shares on other platforms and I specify an exact IP address rather than a computer name. 

 

Hey there is nothing better for codec Support than WDTV.  I can play lossy music, lossless music (FLAC, AP3, ALAC), DVD VOB ISO, MKV, .TS, M2TS with DTS HD audio.  Since I record HDTV in .TS, this is a great plus. And of course WDTV supports the more standard mp3 and AVI codecs. So its hard to give it up.

There are people on this list who have no problems using Windows Network Shares so there has got to be a low cost or a no cost solution.  

As a backup solution, I use Plex as a Media Share with WDTV.  but it has its own issues and media library refreshes are at best cumbersome. 

I’ve considered retiring an old Desktop and making it a dedicated NAS server. But I’m going to wait on that because there has to be a reasonable solution. 

 

8

What works for me is only to turn off the SMP completely for a few minutes, no need to turn off the pc’s.  HAve you tried that?

I wish anyone who knows could say if there was a way to prevent the SMP from becoming the master browser?

Either from the SMP side or even from the network side … 

9

yes there is a way,

find a device that is always on 24/7 and make it the master browser

some routers have this functionality

10

One of my servers is always on and its set to the Master Browser.  So that’s not the issue

11

if you have a server that is always on, the better question is why doesn’t it win the browser election

it’s probably not advertising itself as a server, just an ordinary desktop … etc …

if it’s linux based you can easily solve this by editing smb.conf

here http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Streaming/WANTED-Someone-with-Share-problems-after-2-01-86-that-can-run/m-p/662313/highlight/true#M27262

you can see the smb.conf on WD uses an OS level = 20

so on your server increase the OS level to maybe 40

then reboot the server

it should now win the browser election

if it’s a windows based machine, sorry can’t help, but there’s probably some regedit hack to change this, not sure