Well, having never gotten an answer back on the napster support site… Maybe the Teaming Millions have an idea.
Configuration of home computing setup.
Cisco 675 DSL Router
5 Port 10 base T hub
CPU (and occasionally work laptop, hence the 5 port hub)
Network settings are DCHP assigned IP address, and internally, I see the local maching as 10.0.0.2 and the router as 10.0.0.1.
Have since added Norton Personal Firewall to the mix to try and see what’s trying to communicate so I might be able to diagnose things further.
Napster seems to have great difficulty downloading sometimes, and I can almost never download files from a friends machine that’s got a nearly identical configuration. Other napster users seem to also have tremendous difficulty getting files from my machine.
Now if things were totally disabled, I would at least be able to play around with settings in various places till it started to work, but it does work, just not well enough and it frustrates me.
I know that basically nothing makes it “right”, but none the less I feel like I’m cheating the system with other users can’t seem to get files from me. (somewhere around 1 in 10 different user seems to suceed).
SO… Who’s familiar with how Napster operates and the sort of connection to the net I’m writing about and can give me some pointers on what to test, settings to verify or other information needed to solve this problem.
I have a similar configuation (although with a Linksys router and cable modem rather than Cisco and DSL) and have exactly the same problem.
Question: when you installed Napster, did it try to do an initial contact, then bring up a dialog box with one of the choices being “I am behind a firewall and can do nothing about it”?
I believe the issue has to do with the router remapping the port. You could probably get around this by using a static IP address for your PC, and setting the Napster port for passthrough (to your PC) on the router; however, that would only fix it for one machine. I don’t believe there’s a way to do it with more than one machine without using a proxy server on the firewall.
If it was me, I’d cut out all of the stuff in between you and the internet. Run your DSL straight to your computer, eliminating the hub and the router and the firewall. Test it out and see if it gets better. If it does, add things back until it starts sucking again, then you’ll know what the problem is.
I have a similar setup, though through a Ugate 3200 Gateway instead of Cisco. My Napster works perfectly.
If your home network is running DHCP as you say, then you should tell the router that any incoming connections on port 6699 (what Napster uses) should go to the address 10.0.0.2, or whatever address your PC happens to be at the time, because it can change.
But I wouldn’t think this would cause you to have problems getting files - it would affect others trying to get files from you.
I feel your pain. I can’t help, but I have very similar symptoms using DSL and the standard DSL modem. If I do a search for a song, about 1/3 of the people listed will work to transfer from, the rest will fail. The 1/3 that do work will work forever, like if I add them to the hotlist I can download everything they have no problem. Likewise, if I leave napster up overnight, I can see tons of people trying to download, and about 1/4 of them get ‘Upload Successful’, and the rest get ‘Timeout Error’. But a given person will be able to always sucessfully download. It’s very freaky – like there’s only some machines I can talk to. And people get very pissy when they can’t download from you, and it’s not even my fault!
I’m not sure if I’m using DHCP (I presume I am), but I’ve got the same setup where the computer is 10.0.0.2 and router/modem is 10.0.0.1. Hopefully someone has some insight.