Museum setup prob

crabeater

The local museum was set up with XP Pro on FAT32 drives. Too late to change that (I will get them to do a CONVERT to NTFS as soon as I can straighten out all other problems). They did not spend for even a Pentium2 to act as a server. The entire place is peer-peer. Shared folders have been setup on each PC.

All cable runs are under 50m; in the office I am working all are under 10m. All NICs run at 100Mbps. There are 6 on the 8-port-HUB in the office.

The present problem is on PC2: there are 3 PCs in the science office; I have tried to set up the intels exactly the same, but I MUST be missing something. I have tried a different port on the hub, and a new NIC in PC2. I have added lines in LMHOSTS to try to shorten the search between the two PCs in the office, but neither seems to care.

PC1 is an intel and can quickly [3-7 sec] see other PCs in the museum across the local HUB (not switch) when he clicks on Network Places

PC2 is an intel and every time he clicks on Network Places it takes over 2 min to list the others. You can watch the icon at the bottom & see it waiting, broadcasting, waiting, etc.

PC3 is an apple and can quickly see all shared PCs without problems. I have not attempted to alter this PC.

Other PCs have been checked that are attached to the hub, and they can update in seconds also (I have not seen every PC in the place) - there are 8 PCs on the network.

DHCP is being handled by a Netgear router. I have added to the router settings an entry for it to be a WINS server, but have not heard from the ISP provider (talking to netgear in India is rough too, & no help so far) about whether they are supposed to do more than DHCP.

It seems that PC2 is being forced to do broadcasts to discover the PCs even if it completed a broadcast minutes earlier.

What am I missing?

Jerz

crabeater wrote:

PC2 is an intel and every time he clicks on Network Places it takes over 2 min to list the others. You can watch the icon at the bottom & see it waiting, broadcasting, waiting, etc.

Did you run a test on the cable? or try swapping that pc's network connection with a pc's that's resolving quickly?

ajs1976

crabeater wrote:

DHCP is being handled by a Netgear router. I have added to the router settings an entry for it to be a WINS server, but have not heard from the ISP provider (talking to netgear in India is rough too, & no help so far) about whether they are supposed to do more than DHCP.

A netgear router acting as a WINS server? I didn't know they could do that.

Did you check the node type on each computer? Run 'ipconfig /all' to see it. The node type has to do with broadcasts and other name resolution settings.

crabeater

I was a little surprised that the router was doing DHCP - trying to get documentation to confirm that it is handling WINS, instead of the menu expecting me to tell it to use some other server. WINS & DHCP are on the same page in the router setup, so.....

I looked for errors on the network some weeks ago and didn't see any so after trying the NIC & port I didn't think the wire a likely source of errors but I will try the swap PCs idea - should again run a 'nbtstat -r' and 'netstat -a -e' too.

I also need to run a command I just found out about - 'netcap.exe' is a command line utility to monitor packets. It will take a bit to learn, but looks like a server's Network Monitor in short form.

As for 'node type' I think they were the Same for PC1 & PC2, but can't tell you now what it said.

NetBios over TCP/IP is enabled (it was on 'default') to try to help the situation.

They should have time for me to come in on it again before Friday, so any other ideas before that would help.

nate_lewis

Okay. I used to have this problem with running NT4 PC's mixed with XP. XP would find the NT4 within 2-3 seconds, but the NT4 would take 2-3 minutes to discover the XP. The fix for that problem I opened ports 135-139 in the Windows XP machines firewalls. That includes the SP2 firewall if you have it installed.
If that fixes the problem you might want to find out exactly what port is causing the problem, I opened 135-139 for starters, but if I remember right it was only 138 I had to keep open (XP stops remote access to the DCOM Services on that port).

Hope that helps.
Ta

crabeater

I will try that - if I can figure out how to open the ports.
Those are NetBios ports.

EDIT:
OK - tried that, and a new cable, and opening the firewall (turned it off for a while). Still not working right.

ALSO - I noticed that, on the NIC properties, that thought 'client for MS networks' is installed, the 'Properties' button is not high-lighted. It IS on other PCs there. Re-install did not help.

(It is not high-lighted on my home XP PC either. I can network to 2000Server but not to 2000PRO. On PRO, it can see the XP, but the XP never seems to get access rights to the PRO - and I have it set to allow the world!)

So - any other ideas??
Thanks