I have several NAS and devices(laptops etc) on my LAN.

If my Win 7 Pro laptop sleeps then when I wake it all my NAS drives are
not accessible.
I have to restart to get access again to all NAS.
These are Buffalo NAS. If I use the Buffalo NAS Navigator app it can
see all the NAS and report size and free.

What is going on and how to stop this other than turning off sleep.

Also, in Win Explorer I go to select Network in the left pane and I see
three of my devices on my LAN however I do not see the other usual for
Microsoft. So I cannot look for anything as there are no list items to
select from other than my devices.

How do I fix that.

Thank you in advance.

On 2/19/2024 12:46 PM, BeeJ wrote:
> I have several NAS and devices(laptops etc) on my LAN.
>
> If my Win 7 Pro laptop sleeps then when I wake it all my NAS drives are not accessible.
> I have to restart to get access again to all NAS.
> These are Buffalo NAS.  If I use the Buffalo NAS Navigator app it can see all the NAS and report size and free.
>
> What is going on and how to stop this other than turning off sleep.
>
>
> Also, in Win Explorer I go to select Network in the left pane and I see three of my devices on my LAN however I do not see the other usual for Microsoft.   So I cannot look for anything as there are no list items to select from other than my devices.
>
> How do I fix that.
>
> Thank you in advance.

These are services I might check on the machine I'm typing on. WinXP
would be a pre-Vista OS that might have a different way of naming these things.
But Vista or higher would have these.

services.msc
"Computer Browser" Running ManualStart Participate in BrowseMaster
"Function Discovery Provider Host" Stopped ManualStart SSDP (Simple Service Discover Protocol) Draw network map
"Function Discovery Resource Publication" Running ManualStart NetBIOS?, NTLM? maybe

It could be the network has no BrowseMaster items, participating
in "elections" every 15 minutes or so. It's an activity with
a long time constant, and some Windows machine provides a service
so other machines will know what is going on. If you have two Windows
machines and one of them sleeps, the other machine should self-nominate
itself as BrowseMaster. If absolutely no participants are available,
when the Windows 7 machine is awake, it might take two election cycle
time constants, to return to "normal". When a machine boots, it
could shorten that time a bit.

It is unlikely a NAS would be a Browse Master, and when the first Windows
box comes up, it will query for a Master, and if no participants identify
themselves (during an Election), it will become master. If your NAS boxes
were actually equipped for Browse Master, maybe the symptoms you have
would not have happened.

There might be around seven services that Windows 7 uses for Networking
like that. And for HomeGroups, it likes IPV6 running, and IPV6 is
not always running on a LAN. For example, I'm using an IPV4-only router
on purpose. But, I also have no HomeGroups. HomeGroups are an alternative
to File Sharing. NAS boxes, old ones, are unlikely to know
about HomeGroups and maybe it doesn't matter anyway.

With the SSDP, if you have more than one LAN segment or so,
a bunch of routers, it is possible the Windows 7 network map (a GUI thing)
will be properly populated. I don't know if SSDP is necessary
for any actual service to be carried out.

Some of your computer settings, affect the state of these services.
If you "make your computer discoverable", that's more likely to
have one of those services running so the computer participates
in NameServing. There are multiple NameServing schemes, they can
run in parallal, and your computer does not necessarily have to
participate in all of them. But at least one of them plays
a part in your SAMBA/CIFS file sharing working properly and
participating in the Network Neighbourhood map.

There are two ways to contact a file sharing device, MachineName
and IP Address. My current machine is available at

\\Wallace\Sharing
\\192.168.1.2\Sharing

If the first form fails from another machine, but the second form works,
it could be my FDRP is not running. It's quite common, for Linux machines
(your NAS might be one), to not have the first form working. And only
contacting them by IP works.

Your equipment needs to have the same WorkGroup defined, to make
things visible. Some new installations use "MSHome" instead of "WORKGROUP",
and then you correct the details in sysdm.cpl . But we know that isn't
an issue, because sometimes your network does work. And it's more
likely to be a Nameserving issue. And a BrowseMaster would be needed
as a nominated nameserver for its particular protocol. A BrowseMaster
is an "emulation" of a Domain Server which does not exist on a home
network typically.

*******

In an article like this, the person writing this answer, should have
broken these into groups, to help people understand how important
they are.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/which-services-must-be-enabled-in-services-to/5b3ce622-babd-421e-a312-d0252340fc02

1. DHCP Client \
2. DNS Client \
11. Wired Auto Config <=== part of Ethernet bringup \___ Generally useful services for the average user
15. Wireless Zero Configuration <=== part of Wifi bringup /

5. Remote Procedure Call (RPC) <=== Modern computers cannot function without this, so it's always running
Attempts to stop this, should be rejected by the computer.
3. Network Connections
4. Network Location Awareness
6. Server <=== "Supports file print..."
7. TCP/IP Netbios helper
8. Workstation <=== Now see, I missed this one. The description says it is part of SMB/Samba
9. Function Discovery Resource Publication
10. UPnP Device Host services
12. WLAN Auto Config
13. COM+ Event System
14. Computer Browser

So really, to help you properly, I should know what all of these things do :-)

In Control Panels, Troubleshooters, if the troubleshooters are still working,
there may be one for File Sharing and one for general networking. One of them
for example, the networking stack may identify that you should use the
troubleshooter, and the troubleshooter has a couple command line things
it uses to "reset" the network. Then the question would be, why it didn't
do that in the first place :-)

The OSes are not all created equal, and some, are bullies. And they
have an impact on running state.

Paul