I’ve got my My Book connected with a CAT6 cable directly into my network card and it tends to not be available every now and then. I’ve tried restarting but that doesn’t seem to do any difference. It just seems to randomly connect. When it does connect I have the same icon in My Computer (the drive with a cross over) as earlier so it doesn’t tell me it’s connected, when I do try to open it the icon changes and displays the proper information (space free etc).
I’m thinking it might have to do with my computer acting as DHCP for the connection to the drive. With my limited knowledge of networking I’ve thought that giving the drive a static IP might help, is this a good idea and how do I do that?
I think you may have to assign a static address. I’ve done this with my router, and selected static address in the WD configuration page. It may be called address reservation.
If you’re connecting directly from the NAS to your pc (or Mac) and haven’t set either one to a static address, both will fall back to a zeroconfig address => 169.254.x.x (255.255.0.0). In this case you’re computer isn’t acting as a DHCP server, both units are negotiating for an address in the zeroconfig subnet. Have a look here for more info on zeroconfig.
As for how it’s working, are you saying that you can get to it sometimes and can’t others? Or, is it just that it shows up in My Computer as connected sometimes and others not, but if you double-click the icon is opens normally?
Well it never shows up in My Computer as connected, but sometimes when I try to access the drive it works, that’s after X times of restarting the drive and resetting the connection.
Going to try to get it working now so I can assign a static IP, thanks a lot.
Okay, it seems I’ve managed to get it working. At first I set it as 192.168.0.234, with my router being 192.168.0.1 and my computer being 192.168.0.2. This did however not work as it seems the devices were on different networks. I looked my own IP and my second port was displaying my ip as 192.168.137.1 so I set my drive as 192.168.137.137 and the DNS and Gateway as 192.168.0.1 (I have shared the first ports internet connection in Windows 7).
So if someone has a similar problem do this:
Go into network after logging in on the drive
Choose static IP.
Enter an IP that is within the network of the port the drive is connected to (if you want to check what network you’re on type ipconfig in the command prompt and make sure you look at the right port).
