Sweet, that could be it. Ill try turning off hamachi as soon as I bring the server back up(i shut it down for 2 months while I was away on overseas trip).
Thanks for a tip, this looks very promising

I'm having this exact same issue with my new EX485 and have tried for countless hours to resolve. Anyone make any progress on this?

I too am having problems with this. I am running MSS 2.5 and Mac OS X 10.6.1. I've also tried this with Mac OS X 10.5.8. Same problem. No Firewall, no file sharing. Can't seem to get it to work... any thoughts? Clean installs.

After banging my head in frustration the last 2 nights I see that I'm not the only one with this issue. I've tried all the steps the 'solution' part of that apple page with no luck. I can not get past the 'Authenticated' stage of the software for the Mac.

Using my Parallels VM I am able to connect just fine. I can also use Samba on the Mac and Mount up all the shares just fine. I can also use the Remote Desktop Connection for Mac to RDP into the MediaSmart 485 server just fine.

This seems to be a Windows Networking/NetBIOS issue when using the Mac. It really sucks that HP didn't design the software to work with regular TCP/IP and DNS. I have a feeling if the tool allowed me to just put in an IP address that everything would work fine.

Any update from anyone else on fixes for this? If not I'll spend a few more days poking around trying to fix it, if that fails, back to Costco the unit goes.

Forgot to add, I am seeing this message as well in my Console log, like the others:
9/16/09 Sep 16 11:19:09 PM HP MediaSmart Server Control Center[3398] *** -[NSCFDictionary setObject:forKey:]: attempt to insert nil value (key: Server MAC)

I am also running MacOS 10.5.8. My machine is typically setup for our Active Directory domain, and not WORKGROUP, but I did try changing that last night just to see if it would fix it, no change.

When I run a 'nmblookup <hostname>' it returns the IP just fine as well.

Same exact issue I have. Glad to hear you're experiencing it on Leopard, as the HP support people are quick to blame Snow Leopard.

Yeah, I spent an hour on the phone with them earlier. Hopefully they will have some more info for me in the morning. I sent them some info, but I'm not sure they know... hopefully this will get resolved soon.

Any update from HP on this?

Been playing around with various suggestions in this thread and others and so far no change. Really frustrating. I really want to use this product but considering that 3 of the machines in my house are Mac's if I can't get this working with my Macs I'm going to have to return it.

When I got a call from HP this morning, they said there team was still working on it.

Thanks.

Something else I'm noticing is that every time I try and work on this, a day later, I can no longer even connect to the shares, or RDP into the MediaSmart device, until I power cycle the MediaSmart 485. At this point the Mac MediaSmart Console just spins on 'Checking'. It responds to pings, but I can't do anything with it. It doesn't matter if it's my Mac directly, or from Windows in my Parallels VM.

Hugh ... It seems to me that key words here are "Windows in my Parallels VM". As I know Parallels brings many THINS into system, which might interfere. As an experiment try to uninstall the Parallels, reboot the system, uninstall HP MSS Mac software, again reboot the system, install Mac software again and try it.

Doesn't matter. I have tried on a number of machines that have NEVER have had VMware or Parallels installed.

Thanks for the suggestion but that is not the issue. I've got 3 Mac's at home, all 3 have the issue, and only 1 of them is running Parallels.

Has anyone checked if the plist for the app exists here:? /Library/Preferences/com.hp.mss.client.plist

If so, could you post up the values contained? If not, hmmm..

Cheers

I'm having this problem as well. I spent an hour or so on the phone the other day with Froilan at HP support on this. He couldn't figure it out, I sent him some info, and he is supposed to get back to me. He indicated it might be the fact that I have a switch in my network (that doesn't make any sense).

I don't have any hp preferences in /Library/Preferences.
In /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/ there are two HP files - com.hp.mss.MSSUninstaller.plist and com.hp.mss.ControlCenter.plist.

The control center one really doesn't have anything useful in it. It looks like just a window location.

Nah that doesn't make sense that a switch would cause this. What does make sense is that the app isnt able to determine the MAC address of the server and is dieing out when it goes to write the plist config.



It's getting passed a null value, which isnt getting trapped by the app (tsk tsk.) This shouldn't be a do-or die to contact the server (uses SMB, so why is a MAC address important??) The normal .plist file has the MAC address as one of its values (Server MAC.)

But, why cant these macs get the MAC addy of the server?

Anyone want to touch a plist in /Library/Preferences/ named com.hp.mss.client.plist and see what happens?