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[321-argh]

I have a new DNS-321. When I run the DLink Easy Search utility on my Vista laptop, the DNS-321 is not found. Neither is in found in the list of network places. It seems totally invisible to Vista.

I'm pretty sure the DNS-321 is not the problem, as my old WinXP desktop machine can find it, mount it, and backup to it.

DLink tech support recommends that I uninstall and reinstall the "shareport utility". I have no idea what that means. I can't find a "shareport utility" on my Vista machine, and even if I could, I wouldn't know how to uninstall/reinstall it.

On the DLink DNS-321 support pages, I found drivers for Vista (version 1.02), but no instructions on what to do with them. Do they have to be installed? And if so, how? The DNS-321 QuickStart guide says nothing about installing drivers.

Thanks.

[gunrunnerjohn]

I can't even imagine what D-Link is thinking with the Shareport suggestion.  This is a utility to share the USB port on the DNS-323, I wasn't even aware it applied to the DNS-321 which has no USB capability!

You need to start by disabling ALL firewalls on the Vista machine and seeing if you can find it that way.  If that fails, using a wired connection, boot in Safe Mode with Networking and see if you can find it.

Since you know the IP address of the NAS from the XP machine, try pinging it from the Vista machine and see if you can reach it at all.  If ping works, try accessing the web based setup from the Vista machine.

[321-argh]

@GRJ,
Thanks for the tips.

Since you put ALL firewalls in caps, I assume that there must be more than one firewall hiding inside Vista??  I know very little about Vista. Suggestions on how to disable 'all' the firewalls would be most appreciated.

Does this mean that I would have to leave the firewalls off all the time?  The laptop goes from place to place to place, and I really don't want to leave it unprotected.   I'm planning on upgrading to Win7, and saying bye-bye to Vista.

[gunrunnerjohn]

The reason I emphasize ALL is many folks have a 3rd party firewall installed.  When you disable many of them, they automatically enable the Windows firewall.  Also, the "Internet Security Suite" products usually have a firewall component.

[321-argh]

The problem was not related to firewalls. It was workgroups.  The DNS-321 had a different workgroup setting than the Vista machine.

The root cause seems to be that the DNS-321 ships with a default workgroup of "workgroup".  And the User Guide, page 20, does not tell the (unskilled) user that one must configure the workgroup to be the same as other computers in the home. Instead, it says you can leave the default values.

I don't know what a workgroup is (and I don't much care). I have two computers - one Vista, one XP. They sit side by side. They both came with the workgroup set to MSHOME.  I assume that is what Microsoft uses as the default out-of-box workgroup setting for Vista Home (and presumably for WinXP), since I've never changed it on either of them.

The fix for my Vista problem was easy: log in to the DNS-321 and change the Workgroup setting from "workgroup" to "MSHOME".  (I did not make any changes to firewalls.) Presto - the Vista computer can now see the DNS-321 and map the drive. I did not need to use Easy Search for this.

Oddly, my WinXP machine has always been able to see the DNS-321 (using the Easy Search utility), even though it and the DNS-321 had different workgroups.  Vista must be more picky about this networking stuff.