can not connect

[artist]

I had to buy a new router and since then i have not been able to connect my calibre companion to download books onto my Samsung tab. I have reset everything, restarted several times. Checked and confirmed ip address. Did everything the help section suggested 5 times. It had allways worked before router change. I also changed the router password.

Help please.

[chaley]

Hard to say what is happening, especially as you didn't give us any information about what the configuration was before and after the change.

My guess is that the new router is enforcing either Wireless Isolation or Wireless Guest Mode. Either of these will prevent CC from seeing another computer on your network. Another possibility is that your device is on one network band and the computer running calibre is on another band, and that the router does not permit information transfer between bands.

Another possibility: if you have entered a fixed IP address into CC's connection setup then that could be the problem. The new router will almost certainly use different addresses. If this is the case then change CC to use the default (no address) and see if anything changes.

You don't say what OS is on the machine running calibre. It could be that you need to change the firewall settings because of the new router.

Please tell us the model of the old router and the new router. Also, please send us debug logs for both CC and calibre as described in our FAQ How do I get help? because the logs would permit us to eliminate some obvious causes and might point at non-obvious causes.

[chaley]

Thanks for the debug logs. What they show is that CC can "see" the computer running calibre, can send a message to calibre on that computer, and that calibre can respond. Up to 17 Sept, CC could connect. After 17/Sept connections failed. CC gets a response from calibre when "broadcasting" to find calibre's IP address, but CC fails to connect to either the wireless device port (9090) or the content server port (8080).

The fact that CC gets a response when "broadcasting" means that the router is not the problem, unless the router is set up to block connections on well-known ports. I don't know of any routers that do that, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. What is the brand and model of your router?

The problem is almost certainly caused by "security SW" on the computer running calibre. Something is blocking calibre from accepting network connections on ports 8080 or 9090. The security SW could be a firewall, an antivirus, or a network "security suite" like McAfee, Norton, Bitdefender, MalwareBytes, etc. You need to determine how to tell this SW that calibre is allowed to accept network connections. You can test if security SW is the problem by starting your machine in Safe Mode as described in section 7 of our How To Connect FAQ.

One interesting thing: when connections worked your device had the IP address 192.168.2.5. On or around 17 September that address changed to 192.168.2.4, after which connections stopped working. Is it possible that at some point you told the security SW on the machine running calibre to allow the 2.5 address?

One experiment you could run is to tell your router to give the 2.5 address to your device. You would do this in DHCP settings. Doing this can be complicated and fiddly, so don't do it if you aren't clear on how to go about it.

[artist]

Thank you!
I turned off my McAfee firewall and it now works.
I really appreciate your help.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by artist

Thank you!
I turned off my McAfee firewall and it now works.
I really appreciate your help.

Excellent!

Does turning off the McAfee firewall re-enable the built-in windows one? If it does not then it would be good if you can figure out how to tell McAfee to let calibre work without having to turn it off. Firewalls do help protect computers, especially laptops that might wander onto public WiFi networks.