Consoles On Wireless Bridge Randomly Not Connecting to Mezzmo

**Parallax Abstraction** · 08-03-2012, 07:34 AM

Hey all, hoping someone knows what to do here. I've been using Mezzmo for over a year and am generally quite happy with it. However, I've got a problem happening now that's really frustrating and I'm not sure how to deal with it. I just moved and since running cables in this house is too big a headache, I've bought a Linksys WES610N wireless bridge with a built in 4-port switch in order to put my consoles online. I have a 360 and a PS3 and my Mezzmo PC (along with my router) is two floors up. The connectivity is great, fast and rock solid. However, the problem I'm having is that at random, the consoles are no longer able to connect to Mezzmo.

The 360 will simply say it can't connect to it while the PS3 can list all the folders and pull thumbnails but when I try to play something, it'll say the content was removed. The way I can fix this is by deleting their device profiles from Mezzmo. As soon as I do that, it works again but only until the PC is rebooted, then I have to do it again. I've no idea why honestly. It's not a NAT issue because though the WES610N pulls it's own IP address for admin purposes, the consoles are still pulling IP addresses directly from my router as they always have. According to the 360's NAT test, it's just as open now as it was when it used to be hard wired directly to the router.

Does anyone know what could be up with this and what I can do about it? It's very frustrating to have to remote into my desktop PC on a regular basis, delete the devices, restart the server and renavigate to the content I want to play. Thanks!

**Paul** · 08-03-2012, 09:50 AM

Sounds like your router is acting as a bridge. Bridges often hide the MAC addresses of the devices connected to it. Mezzmo uses MAC addresses to uniquely identify your devices and, if your MAC addresses are hidden, then can cause the problem you are experiencing. Two things you can do:

1. Check if your router/bridge has 'MAC forwarding' or 'MAC pass through' settings. If it does, then configure it so that MAC addresses of devices connected to it are passed through. After making any router changes, reboot your router to make sure the changes have bee applied. Next, go to the Media Devices dialog in Mezzmo and delete all devices. Restart your Mezzmo server and your devices will be re-listed with their MAC addresses.

2. If your router/bridge is not configurable with regards MAC forwarding, then go to the Media Devices dialog in Mezzmo and check the 'Use only IP addresses to identify devices' checkbox and make sure you have static IPs assigned for your devices. Delete all devices in the Media Devices dialog and stop/start your Mezzmo server. That should populate the Media Devices dialog with the DLNA devices in your home (assuming they are turned on).

**Parallax Abstraction** · 08-04-2012, 07:08 AM

Hi Paul! You are indeed correct, the bridge was hiding the proper MAC addresses of my consoles. It's really annoying because not only is there no option in the WES610N to set MAC pass-through but according to some posts in Cisco's forums, it used to default to passing the MAC addresses through until the latest firmware which broke that functionality. Cisco has yet to acknowledge the problem and given that the latest firmware is well over a year old, I suspect a fix is not forthcoming. That's really annoying but was easily solved by assigning the consoles static DHCP leases in my router. All's well now. Thank you again for your help and the great product!