Info hours of wasted time.. No devices shown on network - solved

wensystem3

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Feb 4, 2019
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Hi all.. this may help someone else.

I'm at a my brothers business unit... we're trying to set up a very simple peer to peer network. two laptops and a D Link 320L NAS.

It is not going well.. on one laptop it sees the other laptop and NAS but on the other laptop sees neither the other laptop or NAS.

I decide to take the NAS away and try and figure out what can be done on my own home system that has more devices to play with. Exactly the same.. all devices showed up on a laptop but nothing at all on my main pc..

I went through literally hours of YT suggestions.. Network discovery ticked.. no passwords, editing the Services options. UPNP FDS entries. Most were automatic start up but not all. However even after re-starting - no devices seen.

No I'm getting into obscure fixes... One method involved use net view command in the Dos Command app as part of the detective work. I type it in the command line. C:/ net view and pressed return

Low and behold! a message popped up and said to the effect.. the command net view cannot can't see anything because SMB1 is disabled. Now I remember the rucus over this sometime ago. Win 10 disabling it after 180x update... BUT All of my pc and laptop devices are on exactly the same vs - 1903.

Well i presumed wrong about that being insignificant... because although all of my equipment is on 1903.. all 'except' my pc still had SMB1 enabled! a quick tour of the internet on enabling SMB1 (Turning on Windows features) and instantly the pc now had all of the devices on the network visible.

Now.. the security of SMB1 is another matter.. The NAS, which is only two years old, cannot be updated to the more secure SMB2.. you still have to enable SMB1 to use it!.. but apparently the problem is exposing the devices to the internet not the internal network. I'm not 100% sure on that yet

Suffice to say I'm pleased to find out the reason for the issue... I can sort out the security thing at some time. Why though did the windows updates not disable SMB1 on those devices except my main pc..? a real wild goose chase and only accidentally found.
 
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Are these connected to a router? If you are using only a switch then you can manually assign ip and subnet to each client and mount the share. normally your windows fw will block any inbound connections. both win pc can connect to the nas and use that. if that's the only service you want locally then there is no reason the win pc need to see each other.

I usually turn off network discovery. I mount the SMB using the ip address of the NAS.