This might sound really bizarre, but please bear with me. I very strongly suspect that MC (both versions 15 and 16) does not like the Billion BiPAC 7800N. Or vice versa.
It is a brand new router that I've just bought. It is a very highly regarded one and is "reassuringly expensive". I bought it 2 weeks ago from Amazon but found that it kept locking up. It has a built-in gigabit switch and I found that after a while, all devices connected to it lose their IP address and drop off the network. At this time, the activity lights on the router go berserk, constantly flickering as though there's network activity (but Task Manager on the PCs shows no network activity from the PCs at all). It looks like the router has gone into a loop and is broadcasting God knows what over the network, but no PCs are accepting it. The only way out is to reboot the router.
I sent an email to Billion support, suspecting a problem with the router, but I got no reply. So I then returned it to Amazon for a replacement. But I've got the replacement and it does exactly the same thing.
I have several network devices: an office PC, a MC PC, WD TV Live media player, a Synology NAS, printer, and an iPad (which is the only thing that's wireless). In my experiments I came to realise that the router would lock up if I had more than one device connected to it.
I narrowed it down and started suspecting the PC that I have MC installed on. I could use my office PC all day with other devices switched on with no problems, but shortly after the MC PC was turned on, the problems would start. I thought perhaps it was a faulty network card so I considered replacing, it, but then realised that the only thing running on that PC was MC. So what I did was installed MC (both 15 & 16) onto my office PC, to eliminate the media server PC from the equation.
I just left MC running on the office PC, with nothing else running and with nothing else connected to the network and after a few minutes the router locked up.
So does MC have a networking problem? I decided to run a test with Media Network turned off, so that I'm just using MC on one PC as a player, and it got through 5 songs and then the router locked up.
As I said, this sounds really bizarre, but it's true and it's reproduceable.
This is quite a problem for me because I now cannot use MC to control my DLNA devices.
I suppose the first thing to ask is, is there anyone else using MC with a Billion router?
