Retropie Not Showing On HomeGroup Anymore

[columboscoat]

@NecroCorey Your IP address might have changed if it is dynamic.

[columboscoat]

@columboscoat Especially with a new ISP. If it was contactable on the network before it will be again. Just needs a wee tweak or two.

[NecroCorey]

@columboscoat Thanks for your response. I may have been confusing with my wording. I don't have a new ISP, they just got the internet back on after like two days of it being down.

Having said that, my ip changing, what would that mean actually? Like is there something I would need to do to make it work again because of that? I'm super new to this so not really sure how to fix it if my ip changed.

[columboscoat]

@NecroCorey go to command line type in iwconfig. Post output.

[NecroCorey]

@columboscoat iwconfig didn't give me anything so I thought you may have typod. I did ipconfig instead.

Windows IP Configuration

Ethernet adapter Ethernet:

Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconnected
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :

Wireless LAN adapter Local Area Connection* 2:

Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconnected
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :

Wireless LAN adapter Wi-Fi:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::c077:4083:7c12:1087%10
IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 10.142.129.102
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 10.142.129.212

Ethernet adapter Bluetooth Network Connection:

Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconnected
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :

Tunnel adapter isatap.{A03F96FC-56F7-4293-92DA-9373A715C8BA}:

Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconnected
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :

Tunnel adapter Teredo Tunneling Pseudo-Interface:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
IPv6 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 2001:0:4137:9e76:4e4:1f62:bd55:37ae
Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::4e4:1f62:bd55:37ae%5
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : ::

[columboscoat]

@NecroCorey no. I meant iwconfig. Do you own a Raspberry Pi? Are you looking at it right now? Can you access it and type stuff in? If you are on the desktop terminal please logout and use the actual CLI / terminal / console.

[columboscoat]

@NecroCorey Your IP address looks odd. Are you using a VPN?

[NecroCorey]

@columboscoat Ok so I tried it on the pi and got this result from using iwconfig.

Sorry for the confusion, like I said I basically have no idea what I'm doing. And I'm not using a VPN. What's odd about my ip?

pi@necropi:~ $ iwconfig
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"Linksys35757"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.422 GHz Access Point: 48:F8:B3:BE:D2:16
Bit Rate=65 Mb/s Tx-Power=31 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:on
Link Quality=69/70 Signal level=-41 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:2 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

[mrbwa1]

@NecroCorey Do you have a separate modem and router?

I have the separate and when the ISP (modem) does down and comes back up, I usually have to then reboot the router or else a couple devices disappear off the network like this.

[NecroCorey]

@mrbwa1 I do have a router that I bought serperate from the modem. I did restart them both though to see if it helped last night. Still no good I'm afraid. I could try to unplug everything and replug it back in maybe.

[mrbwa1]

@NecroCorey thanksd for the update. Since you don't have a router, you will probably need to reboot every single PC on the network. Windows uses a concept called Master Browser to populate the network neighborhood. If you don't have a managed network, one PC is usually randomly elected as the Master Browser. When the actual modem goes down, sometime the master browser lookup table quits working right (or a PC that isn't on a lot of the time gets assigned to be the master browser).

Also, by chance, could you post the output from running ifconfig on the Pi? It's a little different than iwconfig and will give the IP addresses and such for interfaces.

[NecroCorey]

@mrbwa1 Thanks for the quick response. I typed ifconfig and got this output from the pi.
I'm not smart enough to even understand what that stuff means, but I hope it helps. I'm gonna try turning off everything I have and see if that helps. My neighbor mooches off my internet as well, so that means I need them to turn everything off as well?

ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr b8:27:eb:3f:00:9e
inet6 addr: fe80::8613:50a6:e533:2557/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1
RX packets:380 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:380 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1
RX bytes:22800 (22.2 KiB) TX bytes:22800 (22.2 KiB)

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr b8:27:eb:6a:55:cb
inet addr:10.142.129.148 Bcast:10.142.129.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::861b:d4e6:c48:5259/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:28138 errors:0 dropped:87 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2880 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:3112633 (2.9 MiB) TX bytes:315548 (308.1 KiB)

[mrbwa1]

@NecroCorey

You neighbor will probably need to reboot everything too. It's a pain because of how windows does networking. Thankfully, I have a router running customer firmware and I can set it to handle all those duties (but you have to have a good deal of familiarity with networking to get customer firmware working right).

Now back to business: The important part of ifconfig is the "wlan0" section "inet address" This is saying your IP address on the Pi is 10.142.129.148. You may be able to get to it in a windoes share by opening File Explorer and entering in the following: "\10.142.129.148" (without the quotes)
With newer networking equipment, you can usually also get away with using the direct network name, even if it is not showing in network neighborhood: "\retropie" (assuming you haven't changed the network name of the Pi)

Before I had my fancy router, I had to access a couple devices by IP address as they would dissappear like this. Usually you can always access via IP address. At the very least, you should be able to access with FTP or say WinSCP with the IP Address. Unfortunately, the IP Address can change unless you can access your modem/router and set up a static ip address.

You can try the direct access thing to see if it'll work for now.

[NecroCorey]

@mrbwa1 Yeah I actually did try doing the //10.142.129.148 thing as well as //RETROPIE like I found on google and it opens my browser with the unable to connect message like it's not there.

I will have them reboot everything though, which would just be....actually they don't have a pc they just use the internet for netflix on their smart tv. Their phones maybe? I'm not sure hahaha.

I actually thought the internet might be messed up on the pi since it won't Scrape anything for games, but if I try to say, download an ES theme it will download that just fine. And I can (SSH?) with Putty which is how I'm doing all these commands you've told me to input.

And just to be sure, the process I'm going to take is shutting down any device that may have used the internet so phones and all that stuff.

[mrbwa1]

@NecroCorey If you are on windows you need to use backslashes "\". Uniux/Linux used forward slashes "//". Forward slashes on windows tries to go to a web page.

EDIT: Only PCs should have to be rebooted. I don't know of any phones or other devices that can become the Master Browser.

I suppose one other thing to try if you haven't already is to go into the Retropie menus and disconnect, then reconnect to the WiFi network.

[NecroCorey]

@mrbwa1 Oh! \ worked! Thanks a lot I can't believe I was just doing the slash wrong.
It also shows up in my homegroup as well after doing that. Does that reset my pc as the master?

Either way huge thanks you were crazy helpful.

[mrbwa1]

@NecroCorey When you go directly to it that way, it can sometime rebuild the master browser tables.

To be honest, Network Neighborhood has always been flaky (especially in the Windows 98 and XP days) so I always just type in the name directly.

I despise the backslashes since everything else in the world uses forward slashes. I think it was just baked into Microsoft stuff for so long that once the WWW appeared, it was too late to change things.

If you want, once you are connect to the pi, you can click on the little icon to the left of the address bar and drag it to the desktop to create a permanent link to "\retropie" (or once you see it in network again, click and drag to make a desktop shortcut). That might save future hassles.

EDIT: You are welcome for the help. My programming skills aren't good enough to contribute to Retropie, but I have years of tech support experience, so I just try to help out where I can.