Network Rendering Troubleshooting

Our support department has come up with a brief guide that may prove useful to troubleshoot issues with network rendering.

If the machines can see each other with Bonjour (show up in the Network view) but cannot connect, there are three possible issues:

• Firewall is blocking the connection

• Unable to resolve the name of the machine into an IP address

• Unable to reach the machine through TCP/IP

When the firewall is blocking the ports, you need to ensure the necessary ports are available for Modo. Please reference the documentation for the network firewall that is in use for information on opening ports.

The other two possibilities can be tested with the ping command in a terminal or an MS-DOS prompt:

ping machineName.local

Ping must be able to get through the firewall for this to work. This command attempts to resolve the IP address for the machine with the name machineName on the LAN. It should return something like this:

PING machineName.local (192.168.1.184): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.184: icmp_seq=0 ttl=128 time=1.487 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.184: icmp_seq=1 ttl=128 time=0.732 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.184: icmp_seq=2 ttl=128 time=4.758 ms

Press Ctrl+C to stop the command. This indicates both that the machine can be reached (the "64 bytes from..." lines) and that the machine name can be resolved into an IP address (in this case, 192.168.1.184).

If the machine name can't be resolved, you get back something like this:

ping: cannot resolve machineName.local: Unknown host

This indicates that you have a problem with your network. If the machine name can be resolved but not reached, you get the following:

PING machineName.local (192.168.1.184): 56 data bytes
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2
Request timeout for icmp_seq 3

This means that the name was resolved to 192.168.1.184, but the packets aren't getting through to the other machine. This also suggests that there is a problem with your network. If you can successfully ping the other machine, then it might make sense to contact your network support specialist.