Cannot ping local host's IP address

I'm having problems similar to one mention here before, computers on my local network cannot see each other. I'm trying to put together a small home network. The network consists of a Linksys WRT54G router, Windows Me desktop and Windows XP Home SP2 notebook. The desktop is cabled to the router and I'm using the wireless LAN for notebook connection to the router.

Both the desktop and notebook have connectivity to the internet. I used the XP Network Setup Wizard to setup the home network and enabled file and print sharing. The setup seemed to go fine. The firewall on the XP notebook has been disabled. But from My Network Places on both I do not see the networked computers. On the XP notebook if I click the View Workgroup Computers, it fails with a message that the workgroup is not accessible.

I found a "How to troubleshoot home networking on Windows XP" article (308007) in the Microsoft Knowledge Base that I followed. What I found out using these troubleshooting steps is that the Windows XP notebook cannot ping itself. My Windows Me desktop could ping the router and itself, but not the notebook. The notebook could ping the router, but not the desktop or itself. The article suggests that the TCP/IP stack may need to be reset and gave instructions (article 299357) to do so with netsh. After this the notebook still could not ping itself. Another article (314067) "How to troubleshoot TCP/IP connectivity with Windows XP" tries to narrow the problem down by checking to see if the internal loopback IP address of 127.0.0.1 responds. It did respond. The article then gives the indication that the problem may be in the routing table or network adapter driver. I've updated the drivers. The article gives no more information on potential problems with the routing table. The article does mention using the "route print" command to look at the routing table, but no other information. The entry in the table for the notebook's IP address had the Destination address as 192.168.1.101, the Netmask as 255.255.255.255, the Gateway as 127.0.0.1 and the Interface as 127.0.0.1, Metric is 25.

I also tried to use the notebooks LAN interface and had the same problems. Any clues as to why the ping on the notebook of it's IP address fails?

 

Welcome to the forum weimaron. Interesting mixture of working and not working - well, interesting to me but gotta be frustrating for you.

If the laptop can reach the internet, the network card and TCP/IP are both working. More information needed to help you troubleshoot further. Do the following and post the contents of the resulting text files. Please do not mask any of the results with **** or #### or similar.

From a cmd prompt

route print > c:\routeprint.txt
ipconfig /all > c:\ipconfig.txt

 

Thanks for the response! I just found the source of the problem. I had disabled the Windows firewall on the XP notebook, but there was also a 3rd party firewall that was enabled. Disabled that firewall and the pings work, I can see both computers on the network.

On to the next problem. My HP pcs 2210 that is connected to the Windows Me desktop that I'm trying to share, cannot be accessed from the XP notebook. But I see that HP has an article on how to solve that problem, looks like it needs to be setup as a local printer that references a network device.

Thanks!

 

Appreciate the update. Sounds like you are nearly there.

 

Well, I can tell you this, the IP address 127.0.0.1 is what is called a "loopback address" It is not assignable to any node on a network since it is used simply for a computer etc to ping it's own NIC. It tells you that your Network Adapter is functioning properly.