I have a LinkStation live LS-CH500L about two months in service. It was working fine this morning, but I suddenly got an XP delayed write error to the drive. At that point, no computer on the network could see it any more. NAS navigator on all machines just indicated there was no NAS device on the network. Going to my router control panel, the router could see it and indicated it had the correct IP address - so the connection to the router was fine. No indication of failure from any status lights -they were on steady blue. Nothing has changed on any machine that uses this drive, and it was working fine 30 minutes before it failed, so this is not a firewall problem either.
I powered down the NAS and brought it back up again, and now all the machines can see it. It's pretty clear from this that it was a NAS problem, not something wrong with the network or any of the machines that use the NAS. So, does anyone have any idea as to what may have happened here? Just some glitch? The NAS is on a UPS, so it was not a power failure (and there wasn't one anyway).
I am a computer scientist with 30 years experience, so I am pretty good at dealing with issues like this. But if I am not around, my wife will not be able to handle such an event. Is there some unreported reliability issue with this device? I noticed a similar report (with somewhat less detail) recently. If these devices are just going to suddenly stop talking, I hope Buffalo is looking into this (admittedly hard to isolate) problem, and wil perhaps come up with a fix.
Is there some documented procedure to follow when the NAS just stops responding for no apparent reason, other than rebooting it?
Well rebooting the device does several different things so it is impossible to say what the issue was given the information provided. It could be a DHCP issue, it could be a bad network cable or unstable connection to the router (although not likely if the router still saw it), it could be firmware or hardware related.
In terms of reliability issues, I have not seen a lot of people with the same issue that you are having. There have been several people outside of the US claiming that the unit will forget the admin password, but have tested this and not been able to replicate the problem. That is the closest thing to a reliability issue that I have heard of, and its far from official.
Was the question on documentation answered or information given? I have a similar problem, rebooting does not restore access; pinging IP address works; no error or trouble lights on the Nas; just no HTML from the NAS.
Is it being found by the NAS NAVI?