Boxee Network Shares

[micmacred]

Hello,

 

I've had an Unraid purring contentedly in my closet for the last year or so. It's connected to a Windows PC and, until recently, and XBMC box. I recently decided to move to the Boxee box after a less tech savvy person joined me here but the Boxee does not seem to be able to discover the unraid shares.

 

I have a bit of a crazy network setup so let me outline that. I, along with the other tenants in my building, join the internet through a wireless router that I do not have physical access to. Rather than trying to serve video over that I dusted off an old router and created a second wired LAN that connects my unraid to my pc and media centre.

 

As I mentioned above, every other computer I've linked to the network has had no trouble finding the unraid shares but the auto-detect feature in boxee and manually entering the unraid's ip address have yielded no results on the boxee. I've got a parallel post on the boxee forum but I thought I'd ask here to see if anyone has any ideas or similar experiences.

 

Thanks,

[MyKroFt]

Need more info.....

 

Before you got the BOXEE, how did you connect your local lan? Were they all wireless, wired etc.  How did you connect before setting up the 2nd lan on the extra router?

 

Most routers do not forward SMB traffic out its WAN port.  You might be better off setting up a switch and static ips so the router is not in the way of anything.  But again - more info please so we can help.

 

Myk

 

[micmacred]

Thanks for the reply Myk.

 

The local lan for the unraid server is all wired. The only computer on the local lan that has internet access (prior to acquiring the Boxee) is my windows pc. The windows pc connects to the shared wireless connection for the internet. Both the unraid and the xbmc are strictly on the local lan (I move files from my windows box to the server).

 

Now I have the Boxee connected to the same shared wireless internet lan as the windows box and wired to the local lan along with the unraid and windows pc. The Windows machine sees the shares no problem, the boxee can't seem to find anything.

 

Way back when I first set up the local network I tried static IPs and had all kinds of trouble. The router is a wrt610 I had lying around. I never had any problem picking up the smb shares through it on the xbmc.

 

Thanks again.

[micmacred]

One more thing, the network address ranges are as follows:

 

wireless is 192.168.1.xxx

 

wired is 192.168.8.xxx

[MyKroFt]

do you have somewhere you can take the boxee and test to see if it sees a friends shares etc?  if the xbmc can see the shares, there is nothing blocking it across your lan.  I would suspect something with the boxee hardware wise.

 

I have both XBMC and a boxee and nothing is setup special for access - they are all on the gigabit switch.

 

Can you ping the boxee's ip address from your pc, can the boxee do any internet streaming of content?

 

Myk

 

[micmacred]

I actually have an update, I discovered that my boxee was connected to some other, unsecured, wireless network for its internet connection. I got it on the one I'm supposed to be on and now I can see my windows pc as a share, but there is still no sign of the unraid. Is it possible that the boxee can only connect to one lan at a time?

[BetaQuasi]

I have only had brief experience with the Boxee, but yes, I believe it is a case of wired OR wireless, not both.  If I were in your situation, I'd get a 4 port wireless AP that can be used as a repeater, like an Asus RT-N16, flashed with DD-WRT.  That way, you can tell its wireless connection to repeat your shared building connection (using the same SSID is fine) and then also have wired LAN.

 

From memory, you can then define your own network, similar to as you are doing now, with your own security passphrase etc.  (Set this up for a friend once a year or two back, but don't remember the finer details.)  This way, the wireless connection essentially becomes your gateway and you don't need to have your stuff connect to both wireless and wired LANs.

 

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Universal_Wireless_Repeater

[micmacred]

whoops, just heard back from the boxee rep. The answer is yes, a boxee can only connect to one network at a time. I guess I'll have to set up my pc to share its internet connection to the unraid network. That sounds like good advice BetaQuasi, thanks. Thanks again to Myk as well.

[BetaQuasi]

Just added more detail to my message after vaguely remembering something I set up a while ago