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    HDD and printer sharing over router's USB port

    Discussion in 'Networking and Wireless' started by Hayoung, Jul 2, 2014.

  1. Hayoung

    Hayoung Notebook Consultant

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    Going to derail this thread, let me know if I should just make a new thread for this but curious how do you file share using a router and a hard drive connected to it? I have TP-LINK TL-WDR4300 and I remember trying once with the included cd to get a printer to work with it through usb and never working.

    Was also thinking of turning my current pc ( old beast with loud 9800gt which I'll get rid of if I do the following ) into a HTPC for video streaming through the network and some file sharing. Want to start reading into this as I may be building next month and have no idea what programs are needed to accomplish this, its running win 7.

    *Goes back into lurking from the shadows*
     
    Hayoung, Jul 2, 2014
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  2. downloads

    downloads No, Dee Dee, no! Super Moderator

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    I'm using a printer connected to USB port of the TP-Link router over network. Works great and it used to work great on my previous TP-Link router too.
    As for file-sharing I prefer to use a dedicated NAS - far more settings and computing power to work with. Even a simple single disk NAS like ZyXEL's NSA310 I use around circles around routers with HDDs connected over USB.

    EDIT: I moved it into a separate thread.
     
    downloads, Jul 2, 2014
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  3. Hayoung

    Hayoung Notebook Consultant

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    Not to worried about the printer now as we got a monochrome brother laser printer that apparently can connect through ethernet, just never bothered doing it yet.
    So not worth messing about with the HTPC, understandable. The ZyXEL NSA310 looks like something I would get but damn the Canadian pricing, $70 USD on Amazon.com versus $131 on .ca.

    Apparently the router has a DLNA server included, I got a Sharp tv that can apparently connect to DLNA's so I'll try mess around with the router settings to get that going so I can stop loading a USB up with movies and plugging it into the back of the tv. Just got to hard reset it as I forgot the password. :(

    edit: got the USB with videos to work, I can connect and move files on and off, and play them on my laptop/desktop. Still no clue what to do about the DLNA, under usb settings all I see is FTP server, media server, storage settings and printer server.

    edit#2: Enabled the media server to show the whole usb, I can see it through windows media player so I guess it's working but the TV is just being picky about seeing it.
     
    Hayoung, Jul 2, 2014
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  4. holacbz5

    holacbz5 Newbie

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    thanks for your amazing site
     
    holacbz5, Jul 3, 2014
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