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(Apologies in advance if this is misplaced here. I'm trying to integrate a NAS into my network and have multiple problems. This is one of several questions that I'm planning to ask about this here.)

I've got a network problem, and my thinking is, first check whether ping works.

When I'm connecting a Synology NAS to a Mac (10.6.8) directly through an ethernet cable, everything works fine, including pinging the NAS from the Mac. I gave the NAS the name "sini", and on the mac

ping sini.local

works fine (I receive back packets).

Now once I do just a very small change - connecting the two devices through a switch (netgear GS108), which has nothing connected except these two devices - and now when I do

ping sini.local

just gives me "request timeouts".

Questions:

  • first check that ping works, is that the right way to go about debugging a network?

  • Does zero configuration networking not work through switches? What am I doing wrong?

  • Funny thing is, the main NAS functionality (through afp) works in both cases. It's just ping and the web interface access that is not working in the second case. Why?

Thanks for any help!

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  • @user15376 What are the IPs when you do the initial ping? What does the IP resolve to when you do the ping in the second configuration? What are the IPs of the devices in the second configuration?
    – Goblinlord
    Commented Jan 28, 2015 at 7:27

2 Answers 2

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first check that ping works, is that the right way to go about debugging a network?

This is one way to go about troubleshooting a network. In my personal experience I've always reached effective results following the OSI layers, starting at the Physical layer. In other words, check cabling, connectors and equipment. Following that I start checking local connectivity to network interfaces and from there trying to reach other nodes and so forth.

Does zero configuration networking not work through switches? What am I doing wrong?

zerconf should not be affected when going through a switch. This is a usual scenario for most zeroconf devices. If however the switch is managed and configured, the configuration may intervene normal behaviour. Your switch, GS108, is not managed and should not effect the behavior of zeroconf.

I suggest doing a arp -a in cmd. Initiate ping to the DNS record(sini) of your NAS and then check the ARP table again to verify if you see a new entry and if so from what IP. This would verify if your DNS resolution works and also provide you with the IP of your nas which you can use to connect through directly.

Try switching network It might be your DNS that is not working correctly.

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    Thank you. I used your mention of arp to get up to speed with my networking knowledge, and watched some screencasts. After I turned everything off an on again, it now works. My guess would be that the arp cache of some device still contained wrong data from an earlier test. I'm closing this now. Since my setup is a bit more complex, and has other issues as well, I will open another question for those.
    – Ugor
    Commented Jan 29, 2015 at 1:22
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It is possible bonjour (mDNS zeroconfig) is not working through the router. It uses multicast which sometimes gets blocked by routers. Most often it will work when both devices are physically on the same switch chip, but lan to wlan often doesn't work and lan to wan almost never works (and in most cases it shouldn't). If you can figure out the actual IP address for the synology, you could ping that instead.

Edit: timeout indicates the mDNS name was resolved but ICMP is not... Should have noticed that earlier.

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