Hey guys,

 

been using my unraid server successfully for about 2 years now no dramas. Randomly run into a problem where I can access unraid menu web gui and apps like sabnzbd, however im unable to access the server files through the windows "network" viewer in the windows

"My computer" type explorer.

 

This HAS happened before, and i can't remember what i did to fix it, i think it was just a temporary problem, but after 3 days this time it's gone away so I'm not sure what is going on or if I've done something to cause it, which i cannot think of what.

 

Any help would be awesome, thanks.

Under SMB Settings, do you have Local Master: Yes? If not, set it and then shutdown the other computers on your network to allow unRAID to take over Local Master.

Just tried that, no luck unfortunately

 

Make sure they are in the same workgroup.

yeah, they are

Also, if you have any other linux based system, ie a router or other device, make sure the master browser is not enabled on it also.  Only one linux device should have master browser turned on or so I've read, and experienced.  When I tried to enable the master browser feature in my router, I had all kinds of issues.

righto, what does master browser function do? is anything going to happen to my network if its turned on, on my router, and then i disable it.

 

I've never had to do this kind of stuff before, as it happened before, and i've been using the unraid server fine for almost 2 years.

http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/NetworkBrowsing.html

as of this morning it's just randomly become visible again on the network. interesting...

righto, what does master browser function do? is anything going to happen to my network if its turned on, on my router, and then i disable it.

The 'master browser' machine is the one that converts the server names to IP addresses when trying to access file level shares (the equivalent to DNS for accessing internet addresses).  The mechanism for deciding which machine on the local network should act as the master browser (if more than one is capable of doing so) is rather arcane and you can get times when a particular machine does not know which machine it should contact to get the IP address for the target of a file request.  This means that you get the case where a particular machine cannot find the server that should satisfy the file level request. 

 

If your unRAID server has a fixed IP address (recommended) then a work-around is to access it using its IP address instead of the server name.  This avoids the need to contact the master browser to find out the target IP address so avoids the potential problem.  Even on a network where the master browser is being found correctly this can provide a small increase in performance as it avoids the lookup step so it can be worth doing anyway.