Have had some issues with our EX4 after the install of latest firmware. First issue, all shared folders disappeared. Luckily a long call to tech support got all my shares back with no apparent data loss. Now however our WD TV devices and Windows PCs cannot ‘see’ the EX 4 shares on the network map. I can manually get to the device via //devicename however this isn’t helping with the WD TV players.
Any ideas? Tech support had us do a full factory reset to get the shares back, wondering if there is some setting we missed when putting this all back together. Have a fixed IP on the EX4 and speed set to 1000.
Name resolution in Windows networking is a bit… poor. So bearing in mind that I know nothing about the network you’re connecting it to, the first thing I would try is setting the NAS to announce itself as the master browser.
To do that go into Settings - Network - Windows Services and turn master browser on.
I had tried the master browser setting but that made things worse. Complicated network set up - I like the WD EX4 to be the master though so suggestions on how to set this and get it to take over on the network would be appreciated. Should I power off everything (lots of devices), set the EX4 as master and then restart everything?
Regardless of this question, after I turned off the master browser switch I re-started the EX4 one more time and voila, everything was back to normal again on my network.
So it probably helps to know what that switch does. The master browser is the machine in a windows network that holds all the name to address resolution lists. It harks back to a time before windows had really good support for IP. Netbios was all the rage and it wasn’t a routeable protocol, so as long as you were keeping to your own local network segment, everything was fine.
Master browsers are chosen by election every 15 minutes or so. The NAS uses samba (linux version of windows networking) and it has a setting that allows you to rig a browser election so that it is always chosen as the master browser.
