Vincent, It might take a little while to get the specific wireshark logs, but I'm fairly certain the reason I can access my ubuntu machine from a windows machine when bonjour isn't running is because...

Vincent, I'm unable to see any of the attachments unfortunately, so I've done another test slightly blind, and had exactly the same results, until I read between the lines of your reply and saw the...

As I said, for samba compatible machines whether wired or wireless, the media machine is available at "media", but this is a feature of the samba protocol. The problem, in short, is that the TD-W8970...

The connectivity of the network is very simple no other routers or hubs are involved, and I can replicate the problem with this setup: "Media Machine" <=====Ethernet====> "TD-W8970" <=====Wi-Fi=====>...

If you're unable to access your machines via their name/name.local, then you may be seeing the same problem that I'm trying to get to the bottom of with my TD-W8970:...

I've now looked at this problem in more detail and the problem seems related to how the TD-W8970 deals with mDNS broadcast from avahi. I'm expecting my machine named "media" to be accessible at...