I finally got around to getting an Xbox 360 last weekend. This weekend I wanted to try streaming pictures and music from my laptop and Droid X to the Xbox via DLNA and my wireless network. No matter what I tried, I could not get the Xbox to see my phone or laptop, nor them then Xbox. I spent hours and hours this weekend searching the Internet and trying everything I could think of, but I couldn’t get it to work. Since none of the devices could see each other, it seemed like it was likely a router issue. While perusing the router settings for the umpteenth time, I noticed that an unfamiliar setting, called AP Isolation, was set to “On”, which was not the default. I looked up the documentation on this setting for my Linksys router and it said:
Creates a separate virtual network for your wireless network. When this feature is enabled, each of your wireless client will be in its own virtual network and will not be able to communicate with each other. You may want to utilize this feature if you have many guests that frequent your wireless network.
Doh! I don’t ever remember turning that setting on, but it sounds like something I would have done. None of the wireless devices on my network have ever needed to talk to each other before, so it probably made sense to turn it on, until now anyway. As soon as I turned off that setting all the devices could suddenly see each other. As the documentation says, this setting only isolates the wireless devices from each other. Since I’ve never tried to get any of my wireless devices to communicate before, it was never an issue. My wireless devices were still able to communicate with all the wired devices, though.
I’m posting this on the off chance it might help someone, and as a reminder to me to be careful when tweaking things because I often forget what I did.