Is there anyone else who has the same problem (see below) and can offer a solution? I also hope that the good people of WD are reading this and can offer a solution.
My situation is as follows:
I have a WDTV Live and connected to its USBport is a 1.5TB harddisk. I used to be able to access the drive quickly over my network with my MacBook Pro (MBP) without any problems. Until yesterday… Since yesterday it takes like forever when I click the drive in Finder to show the files on it.
Yesterday I enabled filesharing on my MBP, so that I could stream movies from my MBP to my WDTV. Since I have enabled filesharing, my MBP is extremely slow in accessing the drive over my network. The only solution to this problem (actually, it’s more of a workaround) is to use my WDTV to access the shared folder on my MAC. When I do this, the speed in acessing the files on the drive attached to the WDTV with my MBP is at good as it used to be.
Is there a solution to this problem? I have tried to disable filesharing on my MBP (because it used to work just fine without it) but to no avail.
If there is anyone who can help me with this, your help is really appreciated.
Yesterday I enabled filesharing on my MBP, so that I could stream movies from my MBP to my WDTV. Since I have enabled filesharing, my MBP is extremely slow in accessing the drive over my network. The only solution to this problem (actually, it’s more of a workaround) is to use my WDTV to access the shared folder on my MAC. When I do this, the speed in acessing the files on the drive attached to the WDTV with my MBP is at good as it used to be.
What version of OS X are you using? Also, when you say you enabled filesharing, what exactly did you turn on?
For enabeling filesharing, I did the following: I enabled filesharing (and only filesharing, nothing else) through SMB (Windows). As far as I know, this is exactely what WD recommends when sharing files.
For enabeling filesharing, I did the following: I enabled filesharing (and only filesharing, nothing else) through SMB (Windows). As far as I know, this is exactely what WD recommends when sharing files.
Please let me know if this answers your question.
Cheers.
OK - so you went into System Preferences | Sharing and ticked the ‘File Sharing’ box, from there clicked ‘Options’, and subsequently ticked ‘Share files and folders using SMB (Windows)’. Just to make sure we’re on the same page, is this correct?
I’d suggest making certain that the workgroup name that the TV Live and the Macbook are using both match. Go to System Preferences | Network, select your network adapter, click ‘Advanced’, and go to the ‘WINS’ section. Check the ‘Workgroup’ value against what the TV Live is using; if they’re not the same, it may cause performance issues. Just to be doubly-safe, make sure the case is the same for both - ‘workgroup’ and ‘WORKGROUP’ may not be handled the same way by one or both of the devices at play here (though they should be, there’s no guarantee that they are, so better to eliminate the possibility up front).
Thank you so much! It seems to be working fine now. The solution is that the ‘Workgroup’ value is case sensitive.
I had done everything you stated in your reply, except… On my WDTV live I had spelled ’ WORKGROUP’ (all uppercase), and on my MBP I had spelled ‘workgroup’ (all lowercase). After changing the value on my MBP to ‘WORKGROUP’ everything works just like before, i.e. browsing files is fast and responsive.
Thank you so much! It seems to be working fine now. The solution is that the ‘Workgroup’ value is case sensitive.
I had done everything you stated in your reply, except… On my WDTV live I had spelled ’ WORKGROUP’ (all uppercase), and on my MBP I had spelled ‘workgroup’ (all lowercase). After changing the value on my MBP to ‘WORKGROUP’ everything works just like before, i.e. browsing files is fast and responsive.
Thanks again! You’re my hero
Cheers,
Floris
No worries, and glad it helped. FWIW, that has been an issue for the entire nine months that I’ve had my TV Live - which means that it not only spans a fair range of firmware and OS versions, but also that it’s difficult to say which device is the true culprit here.
I have exactly the same issue, however changing the workgroup name didn’t work for me.
I tried a completely new word, restarting both Mac and WDTVLive, still no dice.
Basically unusable as a network streamer until this is resolved, anyone else have any ideas?
(When I change the workgroup name on the WDTVLive, it restarts the network, then errors saying it can’t connect to the network - but it can as I can browse the files etc on the share on my Mac…)
So, the Mac’s old version of Samba doesn’t work well with the newest versions of Samba that WD is now using, and that’s something WD needs to fix?
Wouldn’t it be up to Apple to move forward a few dozen Samba revisions so that their Samba works properly?
It seems from a market-share standpoint, if WD can only make it work with one or the other, that they’d be nuts to revert to an older version of Samba that won’t work with Windoze boxes, so that it will remain working with Macs.
“From a Market share standpoint” is a bit of a leap. Unless it doesn’t work at all on Wndows on this FW revision, that’s nonsense…no? If the older version of Samba works with both (and I’m fairly sure I tried both) then why upgrade it and break Mac compatibility.
siksik6 wrote:
“From a Market share standpoint” is a bit of a leap. Unless it doesn’t work at all on Wndows on this FW revision, that’s nonsense…no? If the older version of Samba works with both (and I’m fairly sure I tried both) then why upgrade it and break Mac compatibility.
That exactly why WD changed Samba versions… Microsoft changed their implementation. Anybody who hadn’t updated yet was still ok, but shares were breaking left, right and center for Win users as they got Microsoft updates.
Until WD changed to a working version of Samba, and not any of the ones with known bugs, the only recourse for Win users was a system restore that rolled back to before the Microsoft changes were made.
So, the question remains… if the earlier versions of Smaba have known implementation bugs, why is Apple still using them? And why would any company return to using a set of code that has known bugs, when they’d just spent time, money and effort on re-writing all their code to used the updated, fixed version?
“Here… we know this is broken and won’t work for a vast number of you, but we’ve gone back to it anyways… sorry that your shares no longer work, but we need to keep compatibilty with the broken version Apple insists on using…”
Well they could at least have wanted OSX users it would break their streaming functionality - on a device that’s sold for that purpose, that way I wouldn’t have had to sound ages figuring out why it suddenly stopped working. It’s bad customer service, even if we are the minority of WD customers.
The older versions of Samba do NOT work with Windows7 boxes that use a product called “Live Essentials 2011.” Microsoft started releasing it in components late last year. With this product installed, MS is using some features of the protocol that had previously never been touched, and thus code for those features hadn’t even been written in the SAMBA sources.
Those MS products were put together into a package called Essentials, and it went mainstream a few months ago and now appears in everyone’s Windows Update.
As a result, it broke ALL PREVIOUS versions of Samba prior to Samba 3.5.x (All WDLIVE products used to use 3.0.28a) It didn’t just affect WD; MANY media players and other hardware devices broke.
Samba developers released patches ONLY for versions 3.4 and 3.5, and it’s now integrated into the code starting at version 3.5.6, which is what all the Latest WD firmwares use.
As a Mac user (well actually I use Windows too, but my media is all shared from my Mac) it doesn’t really matter. All I know is a product I bought for this specific purpose stopped working as advertised. No great shakes now I’ve found a workaround though…
But I don’t think Mac users could have been warned… I don’t think anybody knew there would be problems until everything was released, and the Mac users started complaining when things weren’t working right. I don’t think any of the things that get “broken” with new firmwares are ever intentional… we just roll our eyes and shake our heads sometimes at how something no longer working got missed in testing.
Perhaps WD needs some Macs in their test suites.
But, when all is said and done, as far as I can tell, unless WD goes back to breaking it for all Windows users (as Tony points out), the ball would be in Apple’s court in terms of getting it sorted.
Yeah WD definitely need to test with Macs, they’re not the negligible user base they once were! If nothing else, at least this thread will help others that get stuck. I’m happy though, I only use this box for streaming from a share, so I don’t really mind losing the new functionality in the new firmware revisions. Others might though… Definitely sounds like Apple need to sort out upgrading Samba on OSX though… I agree.
It seems to be working fine now. The solution is that the ‘Workgroup’ value is case sensitive.
