10.6.7: Shared Macs appear as PCs in Finder, no shares in iTunes

Question

Hey,
so this is a weird problem I have:
My MacBook, updated to 10.6.7 just last week, shows all the other Macs on my network just as PCs (that means with a PC icon and a lowercase-only name). So there seems to be a problem with AFP, the PC-like-appearance of the other Macs (all of which have Windows sharing turned on) means that my MacBook is falling back to SMB for file sharing. Accessing these machines works, alas only via SMB (lowercase filenames all over the place...)
All the other Macs can "see" and access my MacBook via AFP however, so it just seems to be a problem with the incoming traffic, not the outgoing.
And then I have a very similar problem with iTunes Sharing: All Macs are running iTunes 10.2.1. On My MacBook (the same machine I have the AFP problems on), iTunes will not show me any shared libraries (regardless whether they're simple shares or activated as Home Sharing libraries).
All the other Macs, however, can "see" and access the iTunes library on the affected MacBook. So this seems to be a problem with the incoming traffic as well, as outgoing traffic works just fine.
I figured the cause could be incoming AFP, incoming Bonjour, or both. I checked the firewall settings and they're fine.
Has anyone experienced the same problems? Can anyone give me advice or a sloution to this?
Thank you,
Peter

Answer 1

Hello,
I just wanted to give you a quick follow-up on this topic and then close it. I found the solution.
So it turned out, that it was all my router's fault.
I use a D-Link DIR-300 hardware revision A. It had firmware 1.04 installed with a german language pack. With this firmware, the router was not able to route bonjour traffic connected via wired ethernet to computers connected wireless via AirPort. So my MacBook was sending Bonjour traffic using AirPort, but didn't get any responses. So it couldn't show up on any computer connected using ethernet. AirPort-to AirPort-Bonjour worked fine, ethernet-to-ethernet-Bonjour also worked fine. But AirPort-to-ethernet-Bonjour did not work at all.
I upgraded the router's firmware to the latest version, 1.05. It now works - as long as I omit the german language pack, ironically.