Windows HomeGroup not working; can it be my Linksys router?


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I have two computers (one desktop w/ Win 7 Ultimate, one notebook w/ Win 7 HP).

I have set up a HomeGroup and at first it worked... I was able to share and edit documents from one computer to another, also share my printer.

However, everytime it seems to have connection issues and I cannot acces my files and my printer.

In some cases rebooting my router/modem works, but it's not a preferable situation.

I have a Linksys WRT320N router, and I also read that this router might be the issue here.

Do you guys have suggestions on how to get my HomeGroup working?

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Question for you, what type of network does w7 say your connected to? Public or Home?

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All of your machines in your homegroup, should be home not public - public blocks connections. Every time your machine connects to network if does not recognize the network should ask you, etc. unless you check to always put in public if not known, etc.

Also to be honest, I see no point to homegroups - from a tech setup they made it more difficult and the use of IPv6 was clearly no needed to make it work and just clogs it up even more.

Does just normal file sharing work? Again public profile will prevent that.

edit: Also are you wired or wireless? Sure if wireless not jumping on some other wireless network?

Do you have any issues when wired only and no wireless.

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Yes that it the case... both are Home Network, but my notebook displays my SIDN (I connect wirelessly) and my desktop 'Network'.

I don't have any issues connecting wireless and wired, it's just my HomeGroup..

I do see another 'Unidentified network' (public) which is a VirtualBox Host-Only Network. This might be the 'Oracle VM VitualBox' I have installed to try and see Windows8 and causing these issues.

This latter can be deleted/uninstalled if needed.

So, no known issues with Linksys WRT320N and HomeGroup connection?

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Question for you, what type of network does w7 say your connected to? Public or Home?

post-14624-0-13082800-1324126514_thumb.j

All of your machines in your homegroup, should be home not public - public blocks connections. Every time your machine connects to network if does not recognize the network should ask you, etc. unless you check to always put in public if not known, etc.

Also to be honest, I see no point to homegroups - from a tech setup they made it more difficult and the use of IPv6 was clearly no needed to make it work and just clogs it up even more.

Does just normal file sharing work? Again public profile will prevent that.

edit: Also are you wired or wireless? Sure if wireless not jumping on some other wireless network?

Do you have any issues when wired only and no wireless.

I also see no points to home groups unless maybe you're on dial up. I have all parts of it disabled!!

I used to have one of those routers and never had any issues between computers.

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Notebook = Home network (name: wireless SIDN)

Notebook also gives network name 'Unidentified network' as Public

Desktop = Home network (name: Network)

Therefore I think there might be an issue with the public/virtual box.

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I was not asking about you connecting, I was asking if you see the problem with your home group when all devices are wired.

Or just when the one box is wireless. Connect your laptop to a wire -- do you have problems with homegroup then?

As to known issues with your router and homegroup -- if you do a google for your router model and homegroup lots of threads come up. But that could just be that lots of idiots trying to use homegroups have your same router ;)

I really again do not see the point of it.. You have 2 machines -- just freaking share your folder you want to share ;)

To be honest if you were going to actually want to use homegroups -- then you should actually SETUP ipv6, and have some basic understanding of how it work. I would disable the ipv6 stuff your not going to be using like teredo and 6to4 interfaces, etc. Can you ping your boxes via their ipv6 addresses? Do you even know what their addresses are?

homegroup has to have a working ipv6 network or it fails -- so sure its possible that if your switch/wireless has issues with ipv6 that homegroup could have problems.

Can your devices ping each other with ipv6? You might have to allow that in in firewall, icmp is prob blocked by default

example

C:\Windows\system32>ping fe80::a00:27ff:fe5e:8004

Pinging fe80::a00:27ff:fe5e:8004 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from fe80::a00:27ff:fe5e:8004: time=1ms

Reply from fe80::a00:27ff:fe5e:8004: time<1ms

Reply from fe80::a00:27ff:fe5e:8004: time<1ms

Reply from fe80::a00:27ff:fe5e:8004: time<1ms

Ping statistics for fe80::a00:27ff:fe5e:8004:

Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:

Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 1ms, Average = 0ms

This is me pinging one of my linux boxes link local ipv6 address from my windows 7 machine. I could also ping it via its global ipv6 address

I snipped out portion of it, because will is public and globally accessible ;)

C:\Windows\system32>ping 2001:470:xxxx:b85::200

Pinging 2001:470:xxxx:b85::200 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 2001:470:xxxx:b85::200: time=1ms

Reply from 2001:470:xxxx:b85::200: time<1ms

Reply from 2001:470:xxxx:b85::200: time<1ms

Reply from 2001:470:xxxx:b85::200: time<1ms

Ping statistics for 2001:470:xxxx:b85::200:

Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:

Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 1ms, Average = 0ms

Now keep in mind that ipv6 does not use arp to find mac of other ipv6 devices but NDP, with windows to look at who your computer sees on ipv6 network need to use netsh command to look at your table

example

C:\Windows\system32&gt;netsh interface ipv6 show neighbors

Interface 13: Local Area Connection

Internet Address							  Physical Address   Type
--------------------------------------------  -----------------  -----------
2001:470:xxxx:b85::1						  00-09-5b-e2-cc-db  Reachable (Router)
2001:470:xxxx:b85::200						08-00-27-5e-80-04  Reachable
fe80::a00:27ff:fe5e:8004					  08-00-27-5e-80-04  Reachable
ff02::16									  33-33-00-00-00-16  Permanent
ff02::1:ff00:1								33-33-ff-00-00-01  Permanent
ff02::1:ff00:200							  33-33-ff-00-02-00  Permanent
ff02::1:ff00:666							  33-33-ff-00-06-66  Permanent
ff02::1:ff50:7e7b							 33-33-ff-50-7e-7b  Permanent
ff02::1:ff5e:8004							 33-33-ff-5e-80-04  Permanent

You got to love MS wisdom here -- lets start up a new thing, homegroup and lets use IPv6 for it to work -- ipv6 is not anywhere close to being mainstream and is not just a few new bells on ipv4, its a whole new ball game.

Troubleshooting homegroups is all kinds of fun since it uses ipv6, first thing I would do is verify you can actually see your devices via ipv6, the link local address is fine.. Use that netsh command I gave as example. Can you ping each other via ipv6 address? You might have to adjust your windows firewall, another brilliant move by MS, lets block basic troubleshooting tool like ping ;)

edit: BTW what firmware are you running on it -- have you looked to putting dd-wrt or tomato on it, I think supported by both.

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Notebook wired is not working.

Changing the network names so that both are the same - e.g. W. - is also not working.

Can it be my Kaspersky IS 2012 making trouble here?

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I also see no points to home groups unless maybe you're on dial up. I have all parts of it disabled!!

Huh? What would your internet connection type have to do with Homegroups? They aren't related to each other in the slightest.

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HomeGroup is a real pain, to which I fixed on my network recently.

I had it working fine, then it went b00bs north.

On my sons PC to which the problem existed, I removed him as a member of the home group, I then navigated to this address and removed the files within, address is: C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Roaming\PeerNetworking.

I then checked all these services were running via services.msc

DNS Client

Function Discovery Provider Host

Function Discovery Resource Publication

Peer Networking Grouping

HomeGroup Provider

HomeGroup Listener

SSDP Discovery

UPnP Device Host

Then I joined my HomeGroup via my sons PC and it worked again.

You can also use various tools, right click the network icon in the notification area and check certain events and problems [Troubleshoot problems].

You can also try tools in HomeGroup or try the 'Microsoft fix it application' too.

If you do succeed and cannot get a network printer working then just add it via Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Devices and Printers, that works well.

I hope you sort it out as it is a pain in the rear.

Link below is helpful.

http://www.techradar...5#ixzz1OCpX1f7A

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Try setting the virtualbox network to private (which IIRC gets reset on reboot) but it works for me even with virtualbox (as far as I can tell, don't really use homegroup but it appears to be working)

Edit: also, dumb question but did you try the homegroup troubleshooter?

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I can connect from my desktop to my notebook but not vice versa.

Any idea why that is?

EDIT:

I turned off KIS2012 on my notebook... no success.

EDIT2:

I guess it's not my router. Maybe just a setting on my netbook (or sharing-thingy on my desktop).

Any suggestions for troubleshooting are more than welcome ;)

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When Homegroup goes south on me I just leave the HG on all PC's then just rerun the wizard on each machine. Everything here also goes through a Linksys WiFi router setup on all machines as the Home Network. I'm also using MSSE with no special port privileges, just straight OOBE.

Forget the HG troubleshooter too. I've had it actually fix something in the HG once when I couldn't see other HG PC's from one particular one.

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I have never had any issues getting to work, I just don't see the point to it at all.. I have no use for it - it dumbs down my ability to set file/share permissions.. And sure and the hell am not going to link accounts to online windows accounts to get finer control.

There is no reason what so ever for it to use ipv6 for what it does, which is just asking for more issues.

My current actual network I don't have it running - I have played with it all on virtual machines as learning experience, etc. And everything about it is asking for issues.. But it can work, where I see you most likely having issues is 3rd party firewalls. Users trying to tweak services when they have no idea what they do so prob shut something down. And or with its use of ipv6 is possible that some users routers could be part of the problem.

So users here have issues with simple file sharing and simple broadcasting for netbios name resolution. Yeah I can see them having all kinds of added issues with the more complex homegroups.

You should really take a look the firewall rules that need to be enabled for homegroups to function correctly ;)

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=10561

HomeGroup and Firewall Interaction

If you using 3rd party I could see how that could be a major issue! Its 28 pages of going over the rules created both inbound and outbound on the windows firewall to allow it to function.

You should also read

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11359

HomeGroup Overview

With links to information about Peer-to-Peer and PNRP -- which is al good stuff, but yeah lots of stuff that could go wrong there where stuff is not going to work how its suppose to ;)

I am pretty sure it does require the windows firewall service to be running as well -- so quite often this service is disabled when you install 3rd party, or the user thinks they will just disable the service and then they are not using a firewall, etc.. But that service is tied into lots more now, if you don't want a firewall in windows then turn it off on the profile you don't want it, say home -- but don't dick with the service.

Can it be my Kaspersky IS 2012 making trouble here?

That would be my vote!

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I cannot connect w/ Kaspersky turned off as well as turned on.

I can see, however, my desktop (name in list 'Network' in Windows Explorer) but cannot connect.

I did have Norton 360 installed (and uninstalled). I ran CCleaner once again for possible leftovers.

Windows Firewall is turned off; just KIS2012 running my system.

Still not able to connect...

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Maybe I must add (in case I haven't done it)... HomeGroup and sharing (printer) did work on both computers.

All of a sudden it stopped.

So it can't be a difference in Windows 7 versions (HP and Ultimate), right?

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"Windows Firewall is turned off; just KIS2012 running my system."

So is the actual firewall service running or off? What does services.msc show for your windows firewall service?

So have you gone through the link I provided for homegroups and a firewall and all the ports that need to be allowed for for homegroups to function correctly?? I find that unlikely to be honest.

Does KIS2012 even support ipv6, quick look did not see it listed on the feature list?? For homegroups to work IPv6 is USED!!

No there is no freaking difference between OEM version of the OS and the Retail version other than OEM normally install a lot of crapware on top of the OS install. The OS itself is exactly the same!

Hope you get it worked out, I have pointed you to the firewall requirements for homegroups.. Good Luck! Now if you do a clean install of your OSes and do not install any 3rd party security suites I would be more than happy to help you troubleshoot any issues you run into. But Im like 99% sure if you did not have that 3rd party security suite running than you would not have any issues with homegroups. Homegroups for the mass amount of users should and does just work right out of the box.. You throw in some 3rd party firewall and then wonder why you have issues with core features of the OS -- good luck.

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You can turn on/off windows firewall using script below.

Enabling Windows Firewall

Click Start, Run and type:

Netsh firewall set opmode enable

Disabling Windows Firewall

Click Start, Run and type:

Netsh firewall set opmode disable

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  • 1 month later...

Somewhat late, but better later than...

I ran the script but didn't work.

The strange thing is, that when I access my notebook from my desktop it works, but not the other way around.

So, it might look that there is a port closed or whatever on my notebook.

What might be the case here?

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I had a similar problem and I turned off HomeGroup and made my computers join the network the old school way. Go too:......Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network and Sharing Center\Advanced sharing settings..... At the bottom of the screen under Homegoup connections check the radio button "Use user accounts and passwords to connect to other computers.

As per the Microsoft help file.

Should I manage my home network connections manually or use Windows to do it automatically?

You should let Windows manage your home network connections because it's the easiest and best way to share files and printers.

But if you've previously set up customized sharing permissions on your network following the procedures in Windows XP or Windows Vista and you want to maintain those permissions when using a homegroup, you can choose to manage network connections yourself. If you choose this option, you'll need to use your user account and password when accessing other computers.

To continue using customized permissions, create or join a homegroup, and then follow these steps:

  1. Click to open advanced sharing settings.

  2. Click the chevron GetContent.aspx?assetID=dc557ace-7cf9-449d-a58a-f171c085a22b&documentSet=en-US&Prod=WIN700&Market=US to expand the Home or Work network profile.

  3. Under HomeGroup connections, click Use user accounts and passwords to connect to other computers, and then click Save changes.

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@spdsl, unfortunately that didn't work :angry:

The thing is, that under my Network (in Windows Explorer) I see my desktop listed (but not connectable)

Error message pops up as displayed:

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