Can't connect to NAS

I've got a little more info now. I've been corresponding with Freecom support for a few days but they don't support win7 officially yet, so we're not really getting anywhere.

Interesting thing though - I am able to access the root of the drive and map network drives to it if I use wireless (I'm on a laptop), but not if I use cable. I've tried rebooting with wireless turned off and a cable connected but I can't do anything with the drive (except see it under 'network' in wexplorer), or with the network drives I mapped to it when I was using wireless (it gives a permissions error).

Freecom also suggested I try mapping drives to it using different credentials, trying my windows login details and those for the drive's web interface (can't think why that would work), but that didn't work either.

This is really annoying - 54Mbps access is just not fast enough, and I don't understand why the NIC I use makes any difference.

Most NASes are stripped-out *NIX boxes running some variant of samba, and samba is an imperfect beast. However, the fact that you seem to get better results through wireless is intriguing.

The way to troubleshoot these sorts of network interoperability problems is with a packet sniffer. If you haven't used one before, think of it as a tape recorder for the network. You press "record", reproduce the failure, press "stop", and then analyse the recording at your leisure to understand what's going on. If you can generate such a capture ("recording") and upload it here, I or someone else might be able to help.

Suggested procedure:
1) Download and install Wireshark (www.wireshark.com) on the affected machine.
2) Start a capture on the wireless interface (3rd or 4th button from the left on the toolbar from memory).
3) Initiate a (successful?) connection attempt.
4) Stop, save, zip, and upload the successful capture file, which we're going to compare to...

5) Deactivate the wifi interface if you have to. (in order to force usage of the wired one)
6) Start another wireshark capture, this time on the wired network interface.
7) Repro the failure to connect.
8) Stop, save, zip, and upload the "failed" capture file.


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EDIT: I just read the thread in more detail and noticed that you reported the same issue when trying to connect to shares on the XP machine. In that case, it'll be even better if you go through the procedure above while connecting from Win7 to XP - leaves out the additional samba variables.