Raspbmc loses connection to windows shared folder after inactivity

Question

I have a Raspberry Pi with Raspbmc installed onto it (I have recently updated to the latest nightly build), and, after a bit of playing around, I have managed to get it to connect to a shared folder on my laptop which has video files in it.

However I have noticed that when I first turn on the Pi, or when it has been inactive for a period of time I cannot connect to the shared drive. The only way I have found to rectify this is to ssh onto the Pi, and ping my laptop. After doing this the shared folder can be connected to without issue.

Is there a setting somewhere to get it to maintain the connection properly or have I missed something else obvious!

Any help would be greatly appreciated as the experience of using the Pi is lessened by the need to have Putty on hand to wake it up all the time!

UPDATE: It seems that I don't need to ping the laptop to "wake up" the Pi and allow it to connect to the shared folder. It is actually the act of connecting via SSH that reactivates the share.

Answer 1

It sounds to me like it is a DNS or NetBios issue. I would give both devices (Pi and computer) a static address on the network, and connect to the share with the address rather than the name. The other thing you may have to do is open up the firewall on your computer to the Pi on ports 445 and 139 so that doesn't block you.

These two things will remove all the changing variables that may be causing this. Once you are satisfied that is working like it is supposed to you can start changing things back one by one until you figure out the root cause.