I am sorry about the difficulties you are experiencing, however. Your issues with the system are because of the fact that you are trying to bypass the DHCP server that runs on the core. The reason it is there is PRECISELY the reason that the system can automatically detect file shares and use them.
In order to work best, and this is documented everywhere, you need to either:
(a) use two network cards, internal, and external, and make the core the center of your network.. this isn't as bad as it seems, and is very easy to do with the majority of network setups. You also get a much better firewall, and network QOS provisioning than what you get with most store-bought routers.
(b) use the Single NIC configuration defined in the wiki. However, if you turn off DHCP, you lose network plug and play, and will have to define all of your network resources in the Web Admin manually.
-Thom
1. MythTV only starts about 75% of the time. No idea how to fix this.
2. The Pluto Admin link only works about 50% of the time. I have been forced to access it remotely from my desktop. No idea what is causing this.
3. All my media is stored on a network file server. I have read on the forums here that this is supported out of the box. I wish this was correct. In order to even get the MC to even detect the file server, I had to disable the DHCP server and Firewall (already have one, at a loss as to why there is one installed by default). Now the MC detects the server and the shares, however I am unable to access any of the media on the file server. From some experimentation I have discovered that I need to add each directory I want available on the web admin pages. However there has to be a better way than manually listing all of the directories in the root folder. The user manual has just the basic information, nothing detailed. I am at a loss as to how to fix this.
Any help would be appreciated.