I don’t know if what I want to do is achievable or not but I will try and explain what I’ve done and ask if anyone can see a problem or mistake in my logic.
I am trying to use the USB port on the Technicolor tg852n FTTC router to connect a USB hard disk and use this as a DNLA server and a local network file store to transfer small files when a computer is off line.
I’ve formatted a 150GB USB hard disk as 100GB/40GB partitions as FAT32 using a laptop with a partition manager. I’ve then plugged this into the routers USB port and configured the router to use the 100GB partition as ‘managed’ (for the DLNA server) and the 40GB partition as ‘shared’ for small file transfer. I’ve also set the workgroup to match our local network group
However this is as far as I can get, I can see the partitions and folders with a Windows 7 computer and successfully copied a short video, mp3 and picture file to the appropriate folders on the hard disk. I can also see the DLNA server with the Windows 7 computer but when I access the DLNA server from the same computer I find the following;
The video’s name is repeated twice
The picture is repeated 4 times
The mp3 file is repeated 8 times
(a pattern?)
Trouble is most of my computers and laptops all run Windows 8.1 and I can’t see anything at all with them. The DLNA server does show up in the ‘This PC’ list but not in the ‘Network’ list. I cannot open the server at all, the partitions Disk_1a and Disk_5a do not show up at all neither do any of the folders or the ‘Shared’ folder.
If I try to ‘stream’ the video using the Windows 7 computer the ‘Player’ tries to copy the complete file to the local drive before it will play. I thought the whole idea of the server was that it would ‘stream’ a video not copy it.
I have also tried to see the DLNA server on an Android tablet and although I can see it I cannot see any of the 3 files from the test copy above.
Lastly everything is now so slow the browser will time out trying to access the log in page and I have had to remove the drive to restore normal operation of the router.
So, can it be done and if someone has done it, how?
