Intermitent network problem

I have several PC's in a peer-to-peer network, centred on a Linksys router (handling DHCP) and a 3-Com 16 port switch. The OS's in use are Win95, Win98, XP Pro. Several of the computers are left on over night, but I usually turn my own desktop system off.

Twice in the past 3 days, when I have booted up in the morning, this computer has not been able to see the rest of the network. I have run ipconfig and it reports that the usual configuration is in place. After a re-boot, the rest of the network has become visible, and there have been no other problems throughout the day. Running ipconfig again has shown the same address as before the re-boot. I then tried a full shutdown and re-start, and everything started properly again.

This machine has 2 network adapters; One on the system board,which the manufacturer (IBM) decided not to use, and the second in an expansion slot. I wondered if the on-board adadpter was perhaps being used by the system instead of the one that is actually connected to the network, but I'm not sure how to check that. Ipconfig shows an address of 0.0.0.0 on sub-net 0.0.0.0 for the on-board adapter.

Any suggestions for where to look if this happens again?

 

Set the onboard NIC to disabled. I think that will cure the problem for you. If not, enable it again and unbind it from TCP/IP.

 

Getting worse

Today when I booted up the system I was again without network access. But this time ipconfig reported:

"IP configuration error. Cannot read IP configuration. "

This does not look promising. Again, after a re-start, everything seems normal.

 

Thank you Newt and Tony T. I went looking for the on-board network adapter in the system devices list and it isn't there. Then I remembered that it is disabled in the BIOS, so I suppose Windows doesn't even know it's present.

Another thing I noticed this morning was that although I can't see any of the other computers on our network, I can see the 3 network printers, which have permanent IP addresses (not assigned by the router). I also had Internet access (via the router).

 

Ipconfig shows an address of 0.0.0.0 on sub-net 0.0.0.0 for the on-board adapter

If Ipconfig sees it with address/netmask values (even all zeros), then it is not flagged as disabled.

Also, the last post where your systems can see the fixed addresses but not the auto-assigned devices sounds like you have some browsing problems. Set one of the 'always on' PCs to do browsing and disable it on all the others.

Or else set static IP addresses on all devices and put a hosts file on each PC with the information. That's usually by far the best option on a small network. Faster than any sort of browsing/name resolution.