Question on pinging

Hi!
I think this should be a simple question.

I have a home wireless network using the Netgear MR814 router.
One of the computers is running XP and the other Win98.

I can ping the Win98 machine using ping 192.168.0.3 and get a positive response.

I can't ping using something like 'ping computername' or 'ping computername.workgroup' ie. by name. Does ping not work that way? Is the router not resolving the name?

If it is the second reason, then why can I go to a explorer window and type in \\computername and see the Win98 machine's drives?

Thanks in advance for educating me.

 

A router isn't designed to resolve computer name to ip address. WINS, DNS, hosts or LMHosts file do that job.

Are you running NetBeui? If so, that would be taking care of finding the PC if you do the \\computername\etc. But NetBeui and TCP/IP can't talk to each other.

The simplest way to have your PCs able to ping each other by name would be to build (or modify) a hosts file (no extension) and put a copy in the appropriate folder. Assuming your OS is loaded on C: for each PC

XP - it goes in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc
98 - it goes in c:\windows
NT/2K - it goes in c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc

File needs to have only the following entries

127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.0.x computername (where x indicates an entry for each PC with IP and name)

 

Thank you for your reply. I'll take a look at it.

C