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Have you ever experienced this quirk?
sschmidlap
Member Posts: 45 ■■□□□□□□□□
in Off-Topic
Wireless home network consists of 2 desktops running XP Pro SP2, 1 desktop running Vista Home Premium and 1 laptop running Vista Home Premium. All 4 PCs member of WORKGROUP. Everything worked fine except for one thing, and it took me months (ashamed to say) to come up with a workaround.
There is this one PC with a NetBios name of ROOM. It would show up in the list of Workgroup computers but I could never remotely open the shared folders on it by clicking or typing UNC paths. I knew NTFS permissions were not the issue. I tried pinging by name of ROOM and kept getting request timed out. I made an exception in the firewall for ICMP but nothing. I turned off the firewall and nothing. This was REALLY odd. I use static IP addresses to take that out of the equation, but I couldn't even ping by IP address! And ROOM is connected to the wireless network and Internet the whole time.
Finally, out of nowhere I thought I would check the ARP cache. Hmmmm. The IP address for ROOM is 192.168.0.40 (correct), but the listed MAC is ALL ZEROS!
The only way I could fix this problem was by adding a script in the startup folder to the three other PCs that does a static add of the ROOM Mac address to the arp cache. I also had to use a LMHOSTS file on the other three PCs to link 192.168.0.40 to ROOM. This is only an issue on ROOM. Is this weird or what? Would love to hear comments, opinions and suggestions.
There is this one PC with a NetBios name of ROOM. It would show up in the list of Workgroup computers but I could never remotely open the shared folders on it by clicking or typing UNC paths. I knew NTFS permissions were not the issue. I tried pinging by name of ROOM and kept getting request timed out. I made an exception in the firewall for ICMP but nothing. I turned off the firewall and nothing. This was REALLY odd. I use static IP addresses to take that out of the equation, but I couldn't even ping by IP address! And ROOM is connected to the wireless network and Internet the whole time.
Finally, out of nowhere I thought I would check the ARP cache. Hmmmm. The IP address for ROOM is 192.168.0.40 (correct), but the listed MAC is ALL ZEROS!
The only way I could fix this problem was by adding a script in the startup folder to the three other PCs that does a static add of the ROOM Mac address to the arp cache. I also had to use a LMHOSTS file on the other three PCs to link 192.168.0.40 to ROOM. This is only an issue on ROOM. Is this weird or what? Would love to hear comments, opinions and suggestions.
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RobertKaucher
Member Posts: 4,299 ■■■■■■■■■■
I would bet there is something wrong with either the switch or the NIC on the ROOM PC. Is ROOM connected via a cable? If so, you may want to try a different port on the switch. If that does not work try a new NIC on ROOM.
That's an interesting one, though. Good post! -
Optionssschmidlap
Member Posts: 45 ■■□□□□□□□□
ROOM has a LinkSys G PCI Wireless network adapter. Connects to a wireless router. No switch here. So, like you said, it must be something to do with the NIC. I may spend some time researching it this weekend, but really, just glad it's finally "working". Glad you liked the post.
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Optionstiersten
Member Posts: 4,505
Get a network sniffer on it and another PC. See what ARP packets are being broadcast and if they're valid looking.