Nothing to see here. Move along please.

 

HEADS UP

Unfortunately, the new Belkin Play Max that we thought was the Bee’s knees (compared to the frustrating problems encountered with the Apple AirPort Extreme last week) has turned out to have crazy problems of its own! *sigh*

The new Belkin Play Max appears to have a serious issue in supporting basic UDP protocol (and possibly other things) via its built-in Ethernet switch.

This first showed up for me when my “Teleport” program (Mac-to-Mac KM remote control) stopped working directly after installing the Belkin and using it as the main hub for our home network. At the time, I didn’t see the correlation with the Belkin and set the issue aside in my ever-overflowing, “too hard for now” bin.

A few days later though, I realized that Apple Home Sharing (iTunes etc) wasn’t working, though it had been doing so flawlessly, for months.

Long story short, switching the network back to a spare D-Link Gigabit switch fixed the problem, with both Home Sharing and Teleport! Switching back to the Belkin broke it all again. Bear in mind that this should not be involving ANY routing what-so-ever — just basic Ethernet switching on the local LAN.

I’ve done this switching around several times, just because I could and got exactly the same result every time. I can just stare at iTunes and watch the shared libraries come and go — and Teleport work, then stop working — , as I change cables, without restarting anything.  I have also tested restarting both software and power-cycling machines though, just to be doubly sure if what I’m seeing. In fact, I spent half the day on this issue.

All other networking seems to be working OK, which is pretty weird I guess, considering!

The only thing in common between Home Sharing and Teleport seems to be the use of the UDP protocol — as incredibly unlikely as that may seem, especially at only the physical layer. In fact, this actually suggests that there’s some kind of inadvertent packet filtering taking place in the Belkin. (The firewall is switched off.) But why would the firewall/router even be involved at the physical ether-switch level? That’s something only Belkin can answer I suppose.

Suspecting a (barely) possible issue at the Gigabit Ethernet level — maybe something around “gigabit jumbo frames”, which is often not supported by cheap switches — I tried forcing all the related network interfaces down to 100baseTX. But that made no difference.

So I’m afraid there’s a serious flaw in this unit, somewhere, somehow. I’m hoping its actually a firmware correctable problem and that a fix for it comes soon. But I’m not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, there’s at least one other person having trouble with Home Sharing, using a Belkin router (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=13216871). There’s others with the same problem using different brands in that thread too, so I guess this example is in no way conclusive.

I should point out that the problem with Home Sharing does NOT occur if all computers involved are connecting via the Belkin’s Wi-Fi interface. The problem only appears when cabled, Ethernet is in use — by ANY device trying to access or provide Home Sharing data on the network — and that also includes a second LinkSys WRT54g Wi-Fi access point, connected to an Ethernet port on the back of the Belkin Play Max. Naturally, the same AP works just fine if connected together with the other computers on the test D-Link ether-switch.