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Network Share Disconnecting on Windows Home LAN

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DSPGuy

Occasional Visitor
I'm having issues with Windows drives mapped to the share on my RT-AC68U staying connected. The initial drive mapping works smoothly, but come back an hour or two later, the mapped drive is no longer connected. If I remap it, it does the same thing. Happening on all three of the Win 10 Home edition PCs on my home LAN.
Router Setup
Merlin 386.5_2
Repeater Mode
Router is connected to my LAN via WiFi only.
ioSafe Solo 3 USB drive connected to USB3 port on router.
The signal strength at the router is great at -38 dBm, running at 144 Mbps.
See more router config below.
I've found that with WINS server enabled, I have much more trouble mapping a drive to the share. Often completely unable to. (I know next to nothing about WINS servers, so disabling it was just a poke and hope effort, but seemed to really ease the mapping process.)
Also, the share is not showing up in the network section of my PCs. Not sure why. When mapping the drive, I have to enter the the following text as the folder in the drive mapping dialog box: \\RT-AC68U-SHARE\FireWolfMyRoot\Backup4All, where "FireWolfMyRoot" is a folder at the root level of the USB drive. You can see it in the USB path tree at the bottom of the bipmap below. I have not enabled SMB1 on my Windows machines since I have SMB2 running on the router. I have the share user and password set up in the mapping, with reconnect at signin set as well. I am an experienced electrical engineer, but networking is not my forte.

1649428527801.png
 

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Look for error messages in the router's syslog (System Log - General Log) related to Samba and wsdd2.

I suspect that the reason the shares are not showing up in Explorer is because you're in repeater mode and are not using SMBv1. If you plug a laptop directly into on of the repeater's LAN ports you might now see them.
 
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The dates in the syslog are kinda zainy. I've only had the router a couple of weeks. I got it used from someone. No obvious errors for today's date, April 8, at the end of the file, but it doesn't have any entries for yesterday or the last couple of weeks. Not sure what to make of it. Attached if you're interested in looking at it. I just cleared the syslog so that perhaps I could get one that made more sense from a date standpoint. There are some SMB and samba entries, but again, the dates don't seem to make sense.
 

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There is a setting on the Network Place (Samba) Share / Cloud Disk page called "Maximum number of concurrent connections". I also see it on the FTP share page. It has been set to the default value of 5. I'm wondering if I'm somehow up against that limit. I have 3 PCs with drives mapped to the USB drive share. Not sure if anything else would be counted. Is there a way to see how many connections there are to the share? And what they are?
 
There is a setting on the Network Place (Samba) Share / Cloud Disk page called "Maximum number of concurrent connections". I also see it on the FTP share page. It has been set to the default value of 5. I'm wondering if I'm somehow up against that limit. I have 3 PCs with drives mapped to the USB drive share. Not sure if anything else would be counted. Is there a way to see how many connections there are to the share? And what they are?
Try changing it to 9 and see if it improves matters.
 
If you need for more then 2 places access your better of with a NAS.
From a network integrity standpoint, I agree with you 100%. However, my purpose here is to protect my data. And that includes preventing fire and flood damage. A NAS which is hardened against those elements is extremely expensive. ioSafe produces affordable USB-based drives built to withstand fire and flooding. I have two of them. One is in my basement which would be safer against fire. One is on my third floor, safer against floods. The one on the third floor is accessible only only via WiFi. Hence the WiFi router hosting it.
 
Try changing it to 9 and see if it improves matters.
I had set it to 8 last night before nighty-night to see if that would help. All my backups to it ran last night without issue after that. That's a very good sign. But the problem of mapped drives from my 3 PCs to it dropping has been somewhat intermittent. If it goes a week without issues, I'll be popping the bottle of champagne, or at least a can of PBR.
 
From a network integrity standpoint, I agree with you 100%. However, my purpose here is to protect my data. And that includes preventing fire and flood damage. A NAS which is hardened against those elements is extremely expensive. ioSafe produces affordable USB-based drives built to withstand fire and flooding. I have two of them. One is in my basement which would be safer against fire. One is on my third floor, safer against floods. The one on the third floor is accessible only only via WiFi. Hence the WiFi router hosting it.
If its only the drive which needs these requirements the type of NAS is not important, you can always buy an enclosure or new NAS to get to the data, so use the cheapest NAS for now.
 
you can always buy an enclosure or new NAS to get to the data, so use the cheapest NAS for now.
There may be other approaches. But I feel I'm 95% of the way there now. At this point, I don't want to completely redesign the whole system. If I can get the mapped disks to stay connected, I'm done. Also, I don't have ethernet for a NAS available where I want to have the backup drive.
 
Things are looking pretty good. I've had two nights of backups to the USB drive hanging off the ASUS without issues. The ASUS router tweaks which helped the mapped drives behave seem to be:
1) Turning off the WINS servers
2) Bumping up the max number of connections from the default 5 to 8

I still am having an 'annoyance' that doesn't seem to be a major problem. The drive which is mapped to the share connects ok. It looks like the below.
1649597695703.png

But after some period of time, perhaps 20 minutes or more, it appears disconnected, like below.
1649597633747.jpeg

I opened up a CMD window and entered "net use" to show the mapped drives. It shows the F drive mapping but lists it as disconnected.

But if I double click on it when it is in this disconnected state, it immediately connects again and opens up fine. The net use command then shows it as connected. Also, if while in the disconnected state, if I run a backup which depends on it being connected, it works just fine. So while it actually is disconnecting for whatever reason, it reconnects when there is something attempting to utilize it. Perhaps it is timing out due to lack of use and shutting down. Maybe there is some router or Windows setting which can cause it to be more persistent. I'd prefer that. If anyone knows of one, I'd appreciate you letting me know.

On the topic of the share not showing up in the Windows Explorer network area:
If you plug a laptop directly into on of the repeater's LAN ports you might now see them.
I plugged a laptop into the one of the LAN ports on the router. I turned off the laptop's WiFi just to ensure that its LAN connectivity was exclusively through the copper Ethernet cable. The laptop could browse fine. But it did not result in the router USB share showing up in the Windows Explorer Network area.
 

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I found the fix to the mapped drive disconnecting at Here . There is a timer in Windows which is doing it. I don't recall running into this before. I don't know why it's happening this time. But, it is. Here is the solution which worked. Abbreviated,
  • Open regedit
  • Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters
  • If ‘autodisconnect‘ doesn’t exist on the right side, create it. I had to.
  1. Right-click on the empty space, click on “New>” and click on “DWORD (32-bit) Value“.

  2. Set the name as the “autodisconnect“.
1649613920051.png


  • Now, set the “Hexadecimal” Value of ‘autodisconnect‘ to “ffffffff”.

Might have to reboot. I did, and it worked.
 

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