I have 2 computers running Windows 7 RC (32 and 64 bits) and 2 running Windows XP SP3
I also have 2 uPnP setup, a D-Link DNS-323 and a WRT610N router with a USB Key with media attached to it.
Also the computer running Windows 7 32 bit it also setup to share its library… as a uPnP media Server
When I open my WDTVLive, and go to Video and select “Media Servers” I see all 3 Media Servers Fine and can play any video from them…
If I Select “Network Shares”, I see all my Computers and all the shared folders and files that I have on them… all is ok
The problem is if I leave the WDTVLive open for more than 15-20 minutes… no matter what its doing… watching a movie just browsing YouTube or just watching pictures, or even just sitting there doing nothing… I loose all my network Shares, EXCEPT for the shares that are also running a uPnP Server. They still show up fine in “Network Shares” and in “Media Servers”, Like my Windows 7 32 bit, my DNS-323 and the WRT610N are still available in both sections.
But Windows 7 64bit, and my 2 Windows XP are no longer available in “Network Shares”
Nope its not the power Settings, right after install I disable all kinds of Standby or Hibernation
I do this standard on my PCs… no Screen saver even…
And my main PC - Windows 7 64 bit - I NEVER Turn it off… I reboot from time to time thats it… I can go like 3-4 months without rebooting it…
And also if I turn off the WDTVLive and turn it back on right after… I see everything has I should… All shared Folders do show up in “Network Shares”
And its not a Firewall Issue… if it was I would not be able to access the share any time… not just after 10-15 minutes
Like I could be watching a movie from one of those shared folder… and after 10-15 minutes… it will stop saying that it cant find the file.
If I copy over that file to one of the devices that has a uPnP Media Server active… It will play flawlessly… even a 8GB 1080p MKV file and this via “Network Share” and NOT “Media Server”
Do you have a crossover cable ? Connect the live directly to the pc you are having problems with and see if the drop still occurs . If it doesn’t then it is probably the router.
But I cant really test this since I dont have a crossover cable…
But I don’t think its a router issue… since all the computers and devices that continue to work after the 10-15 minutes are plugged in to the same switch… and I did try moving the cables around at the switch level… same problem.
A = Windows 7 64 bits
B = Windows 7 32 bits (uPnP Media Server Activated)
C = Windows XP SP3
D = D-Link DNS-323 (uPnP Media Server Activated)
E = Linksys WRT610N (Router with USB Port and uPnP Media Server Activated)
F = WDTVLive
A, B, C, D, E all have shared folders acessible trought any computer running Windows,
B +C +D show up has available “Media Libraries” under Windows Media Player… or even my XBOX 360
A +B +C +D +F are connected to a D-Link 8 Port Switch, which is Connected to “E” the WRT610N Router
When I turn the WDTVLive on I see A +B +C +D +E available in the WDTVLive “Network Shares” section
and B +D +E available in the WDTVLive “Media Server” section
After about 10-15 Minutes, I only see B +D +E available in the WDTVLive “Network Shares” and “Media Server” section
A and C are gone… but If I turn off the WDTVLive and turn it back up, they re-appear in “Network Shares”
I have a suspicion about what might be happening, but is just a longshot.
That 10 mins figure sounds very much like the lifetime of netbios names in the cache, so it looks like your WDTV gets a glimpse of the network, but after caching the nebios names of all the PCs in the network for 10 minutes, upon expiring it cannot resolve but a handful. Again this is a wild guess, but maybe those PCs that are disconnecting on the WDTV are on a different subnet than the WDTV and the other PCs, so when the WDTV broadcasts to resolve the names 10 mins after it is turned on the packets only reach the PCs in the same subnet, and the other PCs are immediately disconnected.
So… one thing you could check is the DHCP settings of the router to make sure that all the PCs are in the same subnet, and also check that they are in the same workgroup, otherwise you’d end up with 2 PCs doing master browser duties, and that could confuse the WDTV.
I just double checked the Workgroup names… and its the same on all the PCs and devices
Has for the subnets… they all have the same … 255.255.255.0
What I find strange is that its only the PC/device with a uPnP Media Server active that stays visible…
I’ll do some more testing… like I’m going to disable the uPnP Media Server on my Router and see if the
shared folder will still be visible after a while.
If the WDTVLive behaves has its doing right now… The Router shared Folder should disapear 10-15 minutes after the WDTVLive is turned on…
I’ll post the results later on…
EDIT:
I just disabled the Media Server on my WRT610N… after the 10-15 minutes… the 2 PC disapeared, but the WRT610N shared folder stayed…
And If I turned of and right back on the WDTVLive, I was able to watch a full 45 minutes show with no problem from one of the PCs that had its shares disapears…
“as for the subnets… they all have the same … 255.255.255.0”
That’s not the subnet, it’s the subnet mask. The subnet is the shared portion of the IP among all the IPs of the subnet. The subnet mask (ie 255.255.255.0) defines what part of the IP is the subnet and what is the host .
So to check if they are all in the same subnet, if they all use the typical subnet mask in local networks (255.255.255.0):
192.168.1.1 , 192.168.1.2 , 192.168.1.3 … would all be in the same subnet (192.168.1.x / 255.255.255.0), whereas 192.168.2.1 would be in a different subnet (192.168.2.x / 255.255.255.0).
I’m having this problem too. It is so frustrating, after 15-20 minutes, the movie I’m watching gets cut off and the media player says it can not find the network share. When I go into Video-Network another PC on the network is listed but not the original one ( with the shared folders ). To rectify this, I have to reboot the WD TV Live box. Tried all power saving settings, disabling the firewall and etc,etc.
I have seen that other users are also having this problem ( google wd td live disconnects ) and I think it is related to PC being on a different workgroups or domains, i.e. a master browsing election is messing up everything on the network, and as this box is not configurable in any way it is not possible to set it fixed on certain drive mappings. On my setup I have computers on a workgroup and sometimes there are computers connected that belong to a Domain ( work computers ).
“as for the subnets… they all have the same … 255.255.255.0”
That’s not the subnet, it’s the subnet mask. The subnet is the shared portion of the IP among all the IPs of the subnet. The subnet mask (ie 255.255.255.0) defines what part of the IP is the subnet and what is the host .
So to check if they are all in the same subnet, if they all use the typical subnet mask in local networks (255.255.255.0):
192.168.1.1 , 192.168.1.2 , 192.168.1.3 … would all be in the same subnet (192.168.1.x / 255.255.255.0), whereas 192.168.2.1 would be in a different subnet (192.168.2.x / 255.255.255.0).
My Bad… I should probably have say that they are all at 192.168.1.x with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0
Well if they were in 2 different subnets then it would be easier to point at that as the reason why some PCs stay connected and the rest don’t. If all PCs are in the same subnet and workgroup there will be just one master browser, which for this matter is better than two.
You can check which PC gets elected as master browser from a DOS window, typing NBTSTAT -n on each PC. Only the master browser PC will have an MSBROWSE entry in the table given by that command. After that you can try letting a different PC taking over as master browser (usually the same PC will get elected, it depends on OS version, uptime etc…). There’s a registry key to tell a PC to never get elected, though it would be easier to simply turn off that PC for a while and then another one would get elected, then you can check the WDTV again.
You can check which PC gets elected as master browser from a DOS window, typing NBTSTAT -n on each PC. Only the master browser PC will have an MSBROWSE entry in the table given by that command.
Thanks for you time billstpor,
I ran the “NBTSTAT -n” command on all my computers, but none actually had a MSBROWSE entry…
In fact all of them had the PC name and the Workgroup name repeated twice… so 4 entries
So I turned off all computer and just let 1 open… after 10 minutes, the command still returned the same values… no MSBROWSE entry
If there is no master browser there must be some kind of problem in the network. It’s possible that the switch is not properly broadcasting all the packets sent by the computer browser service, thus preventing the election of the master browser. It’s a bit strange that you don’t have more problems sharing stuff between your PCs though, or seeing them in “my network”.
You should check out the configuration of your switch, if it’s one of those that has a web setup you could take a look at the settings and check if you can enable/disable options that relate to multicast (like IGMP snooping). Even better, if the switch and the router are physically close to each other you could bypass the switch plugging a few PC’s directly to the router’s ports, and see if one of them becomes a master browser, then you’d know the switch is the culprit.
Btw another way (possibly easier) to check which one if any of the PC’s is a master browser, from a single PC, is typing NBTSTAT -a , replacing with each of the local IPs of the other PCs in the workgroup, like NBTSTAT -a 192.168.1.4 That way you don’t need to move around the PCs to check it.
Hm that’s weird to say the least The fact that the WRT300N doesn’t have a host name isn’t weird at all (it’s just a router, it doesn’t need to have a NetBIOS host name), but the fact that the other router does, I’m not sure… It may have to do with the fact that this other router has USB storage, so it needs it for the the FTP or the media server. Btw are you sure the table you see when you did NBTSTAT -a corresponds to the router and not something else? I mean, if it is I guess along with the MSBROWSE entry you should see a couple entries that look like WRT610N or something.
If you are 100% sure that the router is in fact participating in the browser election (and getting elected too) there must be something in its web setup to prevent it from getting elected. Maybe temporarily disabling the USB drive could do the trick for troubleshooting purposes. Or you could try improving the chances of the other PCs to get elected via registry hack. Finally you got the more drastic measure of bypassing the WRT610N, connecting the switch to the main router, again just for troubleshooting.
Yes, I’m sure its the router… I do see WRT610N repeated 3 times, and the Workgroup name “GAMES” also repeated 3 times along side the …__MSBROWSE__. entry
And strangely enough since I noticed that I tried the WDTVLive and no disconnect this time…
Remember that I said that I had powered off all PC and Devices… well I actualy had left on
the main WRT300N router, the second WRT610N router, the switch and my main PC (Win7 64bit)
The reason was because of my network setup…
theres a switch and the WRT610N connected to the main router (WRT300N)…
my main PC and DNS-323 are connected to the WRT610N
the rest of computers and the WDTVLive are connected to the switch
So if I would to unplug either of the routers or the switch… No computer would be on a “network” so they would not be able to see one another… and I guess no “Master browser” election would have occured…
I was aiming to have the main PC elected has master browser by having it he 1st computer on the network… but I guess the WRT610N got it instead… and it looks like its working fine like that…
But for better understanding of the issue I’ll continue to test the issue… like you say, removeing the USB share on the WRT610N and re-checking its configuration…
It is unfortunate there is not something easier for people to use in the home to do file sharing. Everything the home user has access to was created for the business world then trickled down to home so it is bogged down with unecessary things like master browsers , domains and workgroups. There is an easy fix for it but WD hasn’t provided access to users as of yet. All they have to do is allow telnet access to the box without having to install custom firmware.
With telnet people could log into the box and edit the smb.conf file like you can on the custom firmware and solve all their networking issues. It is just a simple text file. That would solve most of the issues, like the smb.conf I use below. It makes the WDTV live box itself always the master browser. The reason for doing that is because the WDTV Live never turns the networking functions off, they are always active even when turn off the box with the remote. It only uses about 10 watts of power so it makes a perfect 24/7 browser .
The problem is WD has it set to the default OS level and when a windows machine is connected or the election process is initiated (samba does this every 15 minutes whether needed or not), the windows pc gets switched to being browser. Turn that pc off and it goes back to the WD and kind of plays a game of musical chairs with every power cycle of a pc :)
I can understand why they didn’t make it the default browser, it would play havok on people that have work networks or complex home networks. But for the average home user, it would work great.
Although this is a little off-topic, it may shed a little light upon what is going on.
I have my HDTV Live hooked up via Ethernet to a WRT610N. The WRT610N connects to a WD Essentials 1.5Tb drive via USB. The Media Server is enabled on the WRT610N.
My intention is to use the HDTV Live primarily as an MP3 player hooked directly to my Denon AVR via HDMI.
What I am finding is that MP3 playback from the Media Server is being interrupted by a network drop on the HDTV Live exactly every 30 minutes, aligned to the point at which MP3 playback was started. You can set your watch by it ! If I turn all other LAN connected devices off (ie. all my PCs), the problem still occurs, ie. it has absolutely nothing to do with Windows 7.
Switching uPNP on / off on the router has no effect. Disabling network shares on the HDTV Live also has no effect. In fact nothin I do on the HDTV Live, or the router, has any bearing at all on the problem.
This is a firmware issue and is present in the latest 1.01.24 release.
Incidentally, I have a Pure Sensia DAB radio connected over wireless to the WRT610N. That can stream MP3s from the WRT610N Media Server all day without ever dropping the network. The issue is local to the HDTV Live.
Well I’ve noticed that on v1.01.24 of the WDTVLive
The Workgroup on it is set the value “Workgroup” - discovered this using the NBTSTAT -A IPAddress
IPAddress beign the WDTVLive IP
I’m guessing here that your Computers and Router are set to a different workgroup…
So you will have 2 Master Browsers in the same network… one on the WDTVLive and the other one
in a computer or the router…
Since you can’t change the WDTVLive Workgroup in v1.01.24, try changing the workgroup of your WRT610N and Computers to the value “Workgroup”
Yemble wrote:
If I turn all other LAN connected devices off (ie. all my PCs), the problem still occurs, ie. it has absolutely nothing to do with Windows 7.
The reason why the problem still occurs may be because the WRT610N is set as a Master Browser at the same time your WDTVLive is… because of the different workgroups…
No matter if the WRT610N has uPnP or shares enabled or not… it still can get elected has MasterBrowser…
The fact that the WRT300N doesn’t have a host name isn’t weird at all (it’s just a router, it doesn’t need to have a NetBIOS host name), but the fact that the other router does, I’m not sure… It may have to do with the fact that this other router has USB storage, so it needs it for the the FTP or the media server. Btw are you sure the table you see when you did NBTSTAT -a corresponds to the router and not something else? I mean, if it is I guess along with the MSBROWSE entry you should see a couple entries that look like WRT610N or something.