UnitiServe is not "rescanning" NAS properly

I was having similar issues. My macmini is used as storage for a portion of my music collection (that was ripped prior to having the serve).

It became increasingly frustrating that recently added files would not be recognized.

What I did, was I "removed" the macmini network store, and then added it again. Once the scan was finished, things seemed to be ok. I have had to do this a couple of times now.

I know this doesn't give a definitive solution/action, but let's yo know that you are not alone. 

My last scan date is also inaccurate.

Regards,

Scot

I had this problem and was advised by Naim to do a re-boot. Cured the problem.

Hi Jon,

From what you describe it indicates that the NAS is on DHCP, so the IP address of the NAS can change if the DHCP server, that is normally built into your ADSL internet modem is restarted or has a problem.  

<techy reason why this happens - skip to next paragraph for solution!>
What can then happen is that another device takes on the IP address that your NAS used to have, which reacts in a similar manner to the NAS and if the master and secondary network browser directory is out of date (that tracks machines on the local network to IP addresses), then when the Serve looks up the IP address of the NAS it gets the old address that now belongs to the other device.    However when it goes to use the share in more detail it then notices that the network share is no longer accessable (as its accessing a different device in reallity) and hence 'hides' all the music from that share in the database, but the basic check of 'are you online' passes.     Depending on network, this situation can be quite stuborn to correct itself, expecially on XP based devices.
</end of reason for those that like a bit of geekyness!>

The easiest way to resolve this is put your NAS on a static IP address.   So say for example your DHCP server gives out IP addresses between 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.100 ,  place your NAS on 192.168.0.101 and that will stop it moving around.     If you need further help on this our tech support team should be able to aim you in the right direction. 

In regards to the other comments about incorrect scan dates, if using the Serve with a non-Windows based share then it cannot automatically detect when the content changes without permanently scanning the folder structure of the NAS drive.   In initial versions of the server code (1.4B and 1.4D) it would automatically scan the drives as a background task to spot changes made.  The problem was that the network traffic of rescanning a drive for changes with huge music collections on could cause subtle performance issues on a typical home network and also caused the hard discs of the NAS to be clattering away at undesirable hours of the day.   We now make it a manual scan, so if you have been changing the content of the NAS, hit the rescan button and then it will resync the server with the NAS. 

Regards

Steve H (Naim R&D)

Steve, thank you for your comments.

"Rescanning" is not fixing the problem, after a while the Serve was not able to "see" the artist/album list (even without a change on the share), but the share is still online and active...

An option in the Serve software for a rescan at a certain point in time (eg during the night when the network is not heavily in use) would be nice...

The NAS was connected via PowerLAN to the rest of the LAN network, I´ve connected the NAS now via LAN and it seems to be better - album list still there after 2 days, new record!

I have to wait several days to see if Serve loses album list again.

br

josef

Problem solved so far, it´s a network issue:

NAS on LAN works well, no loss of album list on UnitiServe, NAS on PowerLAN causes loss of album list frequently.
The "last scan date" stays as it was, still the old one.

But to have a rescan option in the software of UnitiServe to update the album list eg once a day would be nice.

br

josef