WDTV Live and Network Shares

I know you said you tried everything, but did you disable auto login of net shares?  And assuming your net shares are set up without a password (recommended) you should just be logging in anonymously with no password (IOW, not touching anything but just moving down to login).  That’s what you’re doing, right?

It might help to know what your network is (what OS, how many computers are doing what) and what’s on when you turn on the Live for the first time.

I have to admit that while I never have an issue with my NAS on my network, I now notice (never really paid much attention to it before) that my net shares for the other machines do come and go at various times.  I don’t normally access them anyway (because I’m usually using the NAS) but every now and then when my NAS isn’t on I will go out to another share and now I find there is an inconsistency in what is available.  Because I have a LOT of machines and because they have different OSs it’s hard to find a pattern (and it’s also hard to get “stuck” because I can always find some machine that has what I want to see) but I can see a situation where others might be in difficulties if their choices are more limited.

OTOH, my NAS works ALL the time, no matter what – so it’s something to consider (and it’s cheap and much cheaper to run than a computer all the time).

What’s the symptom?  The server doesn’t show up on the list, or it won’t let you log in?

I didn’t say I’d tried everything – just everything I could think of. :slight_smile:

Basic set up is a Windows 7 x64 machine as the main/server system to a Linksys WRT400N and a DLINK switch, all hardwired CAT5e  There are variously three other computers/netbooks that access the system but they are not always on.  Other devices include an HDHomeRun digital tuner and up to three Linksys DMA2100s (two are usually off).

There are five shares on the Main computer, only three I really care about for the WDTVL+ - one for MP4 movies, another for some recent VIDEO_TS rips, and another for TV Series DVD rips mostly in MKV - all of these are in transition as I try to find the best mix of file types for the DMA2100, Media Center and WDTVL+ should I end up keeping it. 

All shares are set with accounts for Guest, Everyone and Anonymous Logon as having full access.  Guest account is enabled.  Local Security Policy “Network access: Let Everyone permissions apply to anonymous users” is Enabled.

For the first two weeks access to the Network shares worked great from WDTVL+ using my own user account and password (the one I login to the computer with).  No problems at all this way, until last night when it just stopped working and kept reporting that the username or password is incorrect, even though that same username and password still works on the main computer itself.

Based on the new advise I double-checked the share permissions and local policies on the computer, cleared login info for network shares on the WDTVL+, cycled power to computer, router, switch and WDTVL+, and have tried logging in as anonymous with no password, Guest with no password, my own login (both with and without password - just in case), and a custom account “wdtv” with no password and full access to all shares.  All fail with an invalid username or password.

Maybe it’s time to break out Wireshark and see if I can tell what’s actually coming from the WDTVL+ when it’s attempting to login; could be it’s confused somehow… or, maybe it’s doing everything right and Windows 7 is at fault, but I really doubt that.  Not that I’ve never seen two completely independent systems fail in different but related ways at the same time, but it’s pretty rare in my experience.

So… Did I miss anything, or are there other questions / techniques that would shed more light on this?

Maybe it’s just because I’m so tired from 3+ hours of tennis, but I didn’t see in your reply that you disabled passwords on your shares, only that you tried it with no password on the Live.  Can you confirm that you removed passwords from the Win 7 shares (that’s in advanced options)?

And I’m assuming (but let’s not) that your workgroup is indeed named WORKGROUP, right?  Because I’d make sure of that as well on all PCs.

Hmmm… well, Password Protected Sharing is turned off (and already was, actually)… but I do see that HomeGroup Connections was set to “Use user accounts and passwords to connect to other computers”.  Again, it was already set this way and worked for two weeks, and I don’t think HomeGroup settings should have any impact on this.   But I’ve seen stranger things so went ahead and set the HomeGroup to “Allow Windows to manage homegroup connections” and we’ll see what happens.  Also verified that workgroup is set to “WORKGROUP”.

This requires logging off and on again to take, so rebooting…

… And, no joy.  After the above and a reboot, I tried accessing the shares from the WDTVL+ with anonymous / no password, Guest / no password, and my own user account w/password and all still report invalid username or password. 

Also, same results after cycling power to the WDTVL+ and again after resetting all login info (again) and trying all of the above usernames (again).

So… what now?

And you made sure that Windows Live ID assistant isn’t installed anywhere on your machines?  (Particularly the Win 7 ones).

Even if it isn’t, it might still be the Windows update that did this – apparently there was a Win update recently that caused at least one person’s setup to stop working (and he couldn’t restore back to a previous version).  I don’t let Windows update automatically (I don’t believe in fixing things which aren’t broken) so I can’t say for sure, but if you could roll back your Win 7 machine in particular to when things were working it might help (and, if so, try it with just the Win 7 machine and the Live on).

mkelley wrote:

And you made sure that Windows Live ID assistant isn’t installed anywhere on your machines?  (Particularly the Win 7 ones).

Well, why didn’t you mention that in the first place?  “Ex-genius” indeed… :wink:

I never used anything Live ID related before but after you mentioned this (and a subsequent search of the forums found 22 threads relating to Live ID Sign-In Assistant - doh!), I found that the “assistant” (using the term loosely) had indeed been installed during the last round of Windows updates.  I do approve all update installs but either missed this or simply had no idea this particular update would cause any trouble.

After removing the assistant and rebooting (again!) I was finally able to login to the shares again - but only with my own username and password.  Guest and anonymous still don’t work, but since my username works I don’t really care about those.

Anywho, I appreciate the hand-holding.  I’m just glad this wasn’t a “slap-my-forehead”, PEBCAK brand of stupid end-user trick. :slight_smile:

Thanks for your help!

Glad you got it working.  My gut feeling is that the Live Assistant thing is causing all kinds of issues for people lately since it looks like it’s getting automagically installed in this latest go around of updates.

I wish WD would look into this in greater detail – I’ll pass it on yet again to them.

(Oh, and while there’s a long story involved, I really AM an ex-genius.  Of all the things I miss, I miss my mind the most).

I haven’t been following this thread until today after getting a dozen notices of new activity today :). 

I had not heard about the windows live ID sign in assistnat issue, but will be checking my Vista machine tonight and make sure it isn’t installed.

I will say my problems have got much better since I went to only using the guest account. However, I have noticed one quirk though that i’m confident is a repeating issue for me.  For some reason if I ever copy a large amount of data (IE several GB of data) onto the server, I then loose access via the WDTV until I reboot the server.  To make it even more unusual, If I save a movie to the share drive using MakeMKV or MKVMerge (IE a slower save), there is no problem, but when I do a straight copy which runs at 60-90 Mb/sec (over a gigabit network) I then loose access.  I dont get authentication errors, the shares just dont show up on the WDTV.  After rebooting the sever (and the WDTV if applicable), everything comes back up.  It also doesnt cuase problems if I only copy a small file onto the share drive.  I can’t find any reason for this to occur.  As long as I reboot when I copy movies over, it pretty much always works.

Hi guys, I have the same problem, if I power off the WD TV Live for more than an hour when I power it back on it won’t connect to the network unless I redo a power off/power on cycle.

Works flawlessly otherwise.

Has anybody found a solution to this?

Thank you, would be enormously appreciated, it has driven me nuts.

No, you DON’T have the same problem.   You already have a thread dedicated to your problem.

I don’t know if this has been solved by anyone but… I have a WD TV Live Plus F/W: wdtvliveplus_1.03.43_B. I have server running WHS an XP laptop and some Win 7 machines. I pull/stream movies from my WHS to my Plus box. I had the problem where you would click on the Network Shares and not get a response. Pulled the power plug, no luck. Restarted my router and switch (all GB Ethernet by the way) no luck. Went to all my computers and turned off the service “computer browser” except for my WHS server. I did restart that service and what do you know, Plus started seeing my network shares. After fiddling around with it I discovered that the computer browser service does affect access, if you do start the Plus first you will have problems or if your “server” gets stuck you can lose the network share access as well. I currently run only Windows machines so if you do here is how you can try this out … (You can access the service by right-clicking on the My Computer icon on your desktop and choose manage / services and applications / services Find computer browser then right click on it and choose properties/ press stop button / in the start up type dropdown box choose disabled Click OK) Hope this helps someone…