Losing Network Shares every few Hours

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

I have two Windows 7 Pro 64 Desktops and a Win 7 64 pro laptop attached to my network.  I have two WDTV boxes that have 1 gbs wired connections to the network. 

For over 2 years I have been using my WDTV to connect to Windows Shares on these desktops to play video, display photos and music. I have been extremely happy with the product and am playing all sorts of video (avi, mkv, mp4), music (flac, mp3) and displaying photos. 

All of these PCs and my WDTV boxes are in the Windows workgroup called “Workgroup” 

They have been working very well over the last 2 years but in the last 12-24 hours I have noticed that I am losing Windows Network Shares every few hours.

The firmware is up to date on both WDTV boxes and I can see the WDTV boxes in my network from every PC.

I noticed today that when I logged in, I could see the three desktops on the Network Shares/Windows Share page. But then after some time (a few hours or so) the PC’s in the selection would suddenly disappear from the selection box of Windows Network Shares. 

I rebooted the PC’s and laptop and restarted the WDTV’s and still no resolution. 

Now I did find a temporary solution … but it only lasted a few hours

The only thing solution that would help would be to power down my router, wait for few minutes and power it back up. But then after a few hours I would see the shares physically start to disappear from the Network Shares/Windows Share selection box. 

Is there anything you an suggest at this point. I don’t know if this is a router issue or port forwarding issue or WD setup issue or even something crazy like a DNS or DHCP issue. 

 

Once again,  I use a wired network connection (a 1 gigabit per second CAT 6 connection). 

This is really baffling because I’ve had complete success with this product for 2 years now and then suddenly its acting up in the last day or so. And I’ve done no Windows updates during that time (I do all my Win 7 upgrades manually)

thank you 

JRF

2

When something has worked fine for a long time and then it doesn’t, it usually indicates a failing unit.   This “feels like” a router issue to me if shares disappear on the WDs and PCs that see them.  It’s a pain, but try another router.

Right now, I am pretty sure I have router issues – my dual band wireless signals seem to fade away and can come back soon, or not at all.  We have enough wireless tablets and phones to indicate the source of problem.  Rebooting router and all is well for 24 hrs or more.   Solution – I have a new router; same make/model to replace the current one with.  Just need the time to do it.  Current one is about a year and a half old, too, and that stinks.

Good luck to you.

3

"The firmware is up to date on both WDTV boxes " , I would suspect the last fimware update then. 

Before going through the effort off that I would check the various networking fixes, starting with the master browser fix as that seems to help the most people.

4

I agree, dcb917 passes on some good ideas above.

5

So far I have success.  My ‘solution’ so far:

  1. I turned off the router for a minute (and unplugged as to switch off)  so as to completely recycle the power

  2. I then renamed the two WDTVLives to specific names - I was remiss and had both WDTV’s named as “WDTVLIVE” - the default out-of-the-box name

So far I’ve been good for day and half. 

But I will do the master browser update as well

thanks to all

Jeff

6

Jeff, Great!  Just yesterday I mentioned to someone here be sure each WD unit has a unique name, so maybe you saw that thread.

7

mike27oct wrote:

Jeff, Great!  Just yesterday I mentioned to someone here be sure each WD unit has a unique name, so maybe you saw that thread.

Hey Mike

Actually the one thing that fixes this problem fully is resetting the firmware back to 1.6 (from 2.0.x).  2.0x is too weird with network shares

I’ve found a workaround too.  I connect to my Serviio DLNA Server to play files. that way I avoid Network shares.  but Network Shares work just fine with 1.6 firmware