Greetings-
I recently replaced our aging CRT based TV with a new Internet connected HDTV, Blue-Ray player, external TV tuner and a notebook running Win7 Windows Media Center. While I have Wi-Fi in our home, wired (CAT5+) Ethernet generally has far fewer problems. The TV room only has one CAT5 jack, and suddenly I have 4 devices. I pulled a spare 8-port Ethernet switch from my parts box and cascaded it off the switch in my home office that feeds the CAT5 jack in the TV room.
All the devices in the TV room picked up IP addresses from my home router, they all had Internet access, and I could use Remote Desktop Protocol to control the WMC PC in the TV room from my office PC. What I could not do was see or access the shared folders on the WMC PC across my LAN. The shares worked fine when I setup the WMC PC in my office. I switched the WMC PC to a Wi-Fi link, and suddenly I could get to those shared folders.
It was then that I realized that when I set up the WMC PC in my office, both PCs were connected to my office switch. For whatever reason, my spare switch will only pass NetBIOS packets to devices directly connected to the switch. If there is an additional hop through any other switch in the LAN, NetBIOS packets are blocked (Windows uses NetBIOS via TCP/IP to control shares within a LAN). I have no idea if this is an undocumented security feature of this switch, or just flaky programming.
The problem was solved by purchasing another switch – actually two new switches. Small unmanaged gigabit switches are now about the same price as the equivalent 100 megabit switches were a couple years ago.
If you are banging your head against the wall and have a wired network, try a different switch.
By the way, the reason for the shares on the WMC PC is that it is easier to transfer digital photos from our cameras to my office PC, clean them up in a traditional Windows environment, then transfer the photos to the WMC PC for display. We purchased a 47″ LCD TV with local dimming LED backlighting for an incredible contrast range. Seeing our photos on the TV is WAY superior to my office monitors or even having them printed.
