A Mac, an XP, and a Vista all walk into an Itunes...

July 1, 2009 11:42 PM

I am having trouble sharing music files in itunes over a wireless network. The three computers involved are a Mac, an XP, and a Vista.

There are 3 computers in this house, connected to one wireless network. One Vista (sigh), one XP, one mac. All 3 computers are set in ITunes (8.0.2.23) to both look for shared music libraries and share their own music libraries. The Vista machine can't see the music from the other two properly.

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Between the Mac and the XP machine, everything is fine. They both see each other's shared music. Additionally, they also both see the Vista's shared music.

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Between the XP and the Vista machine, The XP sees Vista's music, but the Vista does not see XP's music.

Things I already know are set reasonably:
1) Firewall exceptions for itunes.exe and for Bonjour are set in both Vista and XP machines.
2) I also added an exception for Port 3689 to both machines.
3) The XP machine is visible under "Network" in Vista on the Vista machine. I can see and open the XP machine's normal shared files (does not include Itunes here, but it shouldn't have to) on the Vista.
4) The Vista machine has Network Discovery, File Sharing, Public Folder Sharing (read only), Password protected sharing, and Media Sharing all turned on.

Things I tried which do not work:
1) Turning off firewall on just XP machine entirely
2) Turning off firewall on just vista machine entirely
3) Turning off firewalls on both machines, entirely
4) Cursing furiously, fantasizing about installing a different OS on the Vista machine (might work if I actually did, but I'm still at the fantasizing stage). Subsequently informing the Vista machine that I really do care for it and it shouldn't take my hatred of its operating system personally doesn't help either.

Things I would prefer not to do:
1) Enable sharing through XP on all of my music on that computer, then manually tell ITunes that music exists in the shared folders. Why? well, because I don't store music in one place on XP. It would take a while to find, and I'd have to set a ton of permissions. I'm also not sure that ITunes can add music manually that is in a shared folder on another computer.
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Between the Mac and the Vista machine, the behavior is a little better. Again, the Mac sees the Vista share just fine. The Vista sees the Mac share when I first load itunes, or when I uncheck and then recheck the "look for shared music libraries" option. If I just sit around and chill, the mac share will disappear after a few minutes. Wierdly, if I play something from the Mac, then the Mac share stays visible indefinitely (or as long as I've had the patience to wait, anyhow). So this is more annoying than actually a problem, but it might help diagnose what the Vista machine's attitude problem is about.

Any ideas? I'm stumped.

posted by nat to computers & internet (4 answers total)

If I just sit around and chill, the mac share will disappear after a few minutes. Wierdly, if I play something from the Mac, then the Mac share stays visible indefinitely (or as long as I've had the patience to wait, anyhow).

This suggests to me that multicast is being blocked.

Try opening port 5353 (multicast DNS) and allowing traffic to/from 224.0.0.251 (the multicast broadcast address) on your firewall.

Don't worry, it's local traffic and shouldn't go to the outside world (the 224.x.x.x range is the multicast equivalent of 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x). But if you want to be sure, block it from the WAN side of your connection but allow it internally.
posted by Pinback at 11:55 PM on July 1, 2009

(Actually, hmmm... you're running *multiple* iTunes shares? You might need to open up 224.0.0.0/24, or at least .251 & .252 (I think they auto increment by default where iTunes / Bonjour sees clashes...))
posted by Pinback at 11:58 PM on July 1, 2009

Adding an exception for port 5353 for that address to the firewall on the Vista machine didn't seem to help-- the XP library still doesn't show up, and the Mac library has the same behavior as before. Adding the 5353 exception on the XP machine didn't make its music show up on Vista either. I did not try a restart between adding it though; is that likely to be useful?

One more thing I forgot to mention: the wireless router everybody is communicating through is a Linksys (purchased last September). I don't recall any more data on it, I don't think we're running anything unusual there but I suppose it's possible some changes to the router settings might help too (although since only the Vista machine is misbehaving, i'm inclined to think it's the issue).
posted by nat at 12:26 AM on July 2, 2009

Errr... someone else want to step up with the Windows/Linksys-specific info? Although the symptoms are the same (iTunes shares appearing then disappearing within a couple of minutes; currently-active connections lasting 10 mins or more), my experience with this is all from mixed Mac/Win2k networks with OpenBSD firewalls & daapd running on Linux ;-)

At a guess, though, I'd suspect the problem is still multicast traffic being filtered/blocked. A quick Googling of +"linksys" +"multicast" +"itunes" suggests that checking (or possibly unchecking; gotta love unexplained indeterminate settings!) the "Filter Multicast" option on the advanced / security page of some Linksys models does the trick.

That said, I tend to agree with you - seeing as the XP & OS X machines are fine, I'd be looking at something in the Vista machine's settings. Thought: is Bonjour / mDNSresponder up & running (under the admin CP, services) on the Vista machine?
posted by Pinback at 3:04 AM on July 2, 2009