OK, firstly, I'm new at this, so be gentle...
2nd, I thought I should post in "Tomato" and not in the 3500L forum because I'm guessing my problems are due to my ignorance about Tomato and not specific to my router. If this is the wrong forum for my questions, let me know or just move the thread.
I just flashed my Netgear WNR3500L v1 router with "Tomato Firmware v1.28.7503 MIPSR2Toastman-RT K26 USB VPN-NOCAT". Thigs went pretty smoothly, and my home network seemed fine (Motorola Cable modem, several computers - mostly Win7, a VoIP access point, switches and other devices connected to the router bother through ethernet and wireless). The router's DHCP server seemed fine after I enabled it, and I allocated a few static IP addresses to my most commonly used devices, but left others unassigned.
I connected a USB external 2TB hard drive to the router and enabled Samba file sharing on the router (No Authentication). After a bit of stumbling around, I got the hard drive to show up on my network and could access it and move files around etc. It was named "UNKNOWN" even though the drive label has been set to "Elements", and I couldn't figure out how to change that, but that was a minor problem.
I started moving files onto the drive using Robocopy, and left a copy script running overnight. When I woke up, the job had hung up trying to access the USB drive. On further inspection, all sort of confusing things are going on:
- I could no longer see the router/hard drive ("UNKNOWN") in my network, from my desktop Windows PC.
- I *CAN* see "UNKNOWN" (the drive attached to my router) from other PC's, just not from my desktop.
- My main desktop PC could not connect to the router's Tomato GUI, until I set it up to have a static IP address. This is a change since 24 hours ago, and other PC's on my network connect just fine without static IP's. All of them have static IP's designated in the "Static DHCP/ARP" page in the Tomato GUI, so I don't know why I would have to also declare a static IP on my desktop.
It seems like something happened while copying a large amount of file data over the network to the attached USB drive, causing something to be changed/broken with my desktop's connection to the network, such that (A) I need to assign a static IP on my desktop (even though it should be assigned by the router's DHCP server), and (B) even when I've done this, my desktop cannot see the router-attached drive.
Can anyone advise me about these problems (which I'm fairly sure are caused by my own ignorance somehow)?
note: Only today have I seen a couple of posts mentioning the 30-30-30 router reset method. I have not done that at any point - do I need to do that now? Or start over and do the 30-30-30 reset and then re-flash the toastman firmware for some reason?
Thanks for any help you can provide. Sorry this ended up so long (but let me know if I need to supply more info).
More confusion: I just noticed that I had an old window open on my desktop with a subfolder of the "UNKNOWN" USB drive. To my surprise, I could refresh it, navigate, and access files on the drive just fine. If I copy and paste the full address of that folder:
\\UNKNOWN\Elements\MEDIA\MB\D\MOVIES\
into another folder window, it opens up just fine. But when I open "My Computer" and then "Network", it shows me all the other computers attached to my workgroup/network but not "UNKNOWN".
So I was incorrect claiming that I couldn't connect to the drive from my desktop - it's just hidden somehow so that it doesn't appear in the network window (as it did 24 hours ago).