Bizzare Home/Office Network Problem

I have an XP and ME machine on a hub with Home/Office networking installed. Each machine connects to the internet directly through the hub although that all works and I don't think that is influencing my problem.

Each time I reboot the ME machine it says it cannot connect to the XP machine (I have a mapped drive). That in an of itself is not the problem. When I use the browser to look at the workgroup, on each machine, it only shows itself. If I do a search on ME for the XP machine by name it cannot find it. If I do a search by IP address it is successful. I can then re-search by name and that is successful. Then everything becomes accessible until the next reboot. BTW, browsing the workgroup still only shows 1 machine each.

Does anyone have some ideas as to where I should start to shoot this bug? Thanks.

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Since then I have done some experimenting and have more information which leads me to believe it is XP.

This configuration originally worked. I installed some software on the ME machine and something (I thought) caused this to happen. I decided to wipe the HD and restored to a known working date. When this was done the problem persisted. THe inescapable conclusion is that the problem resides on the XP machine which contains the shared partition. Changes have been made there too but this one is not so easily wiped and reloaded.

Interestingly, I have found that although I can get the share to work on the ME machine using the technique discribed in the link, the share will unceremoniously just go away without either machine rebooting. I have no idea what that means but maybe it is a clue to someone.

The key seems to be that fact that neither machine recognizes the other within the work group, on initial boot. They do recognize each other, as I said, after doing a search.

At this point I am at a loss as to what to do next. Can someone please point me in another direction? Thanks.

 

gw1500se - whew. I think I have all the parts together and the thread located where you are most likely to get help.

I assume from your use of a hub that both PCs have IP addresses assigned by your ISP. Static or dynamic? And in either case, please post the current IP address & subnet mask of each PC.

Are you running a protocol other than TCP/IP?

Do you log onto the ME PC with a username/password and, if so, is that username/password included in the local users on your XP system?

As a side note (not specific to your problem but related to your setup) do you have to pay the ISP a monthly fee for a second IP address?

 

Thanks for the reply. Details, details, details.

I never know how much is too much so I try to give enough to prevent getting bogged down on tangents. Anyway here are the rest of the details on the configuration.

The IP addresses on the NICs are non-routable. It is the PPPoE interface on each machine that is assigned by the ISP for internet connectiion. Initially, it was configured so that the IP of the NICs were automatically assigned by windows. I made the silly assumption that Microsoft knew what it was doing with the netsetup.exe so that it would make sure the assigned IPs on each machine was unique and on the same network. That was my first problem I overcame to get it working the first time. I assigned the IP on one machine to match the network of the other. Which was fine for a while.

I am running only TCP/IP and there is no network sign-on. The only passwords are on the shared resources.

Having said all that I have since gotten things to work again for reasons I don't completely understand. Perhaps it has something to do with the class network Windows randomly chooses for the automatic IP. Anyway, when I did a complete resore of the ME machine I noticed that the assigned IP was completely different and a different class network. This puzzled me because I would have expected the assigned address to be retained in one of the restored files.

Bottom line is now that it is working, I decided to statically assign the addresses on both machines instead of just one. Although, there is no logical reason why it stopped working in the first place as the IP addresses were fien then. As I said the only thing I can think of is the class of the assigned network address. Now, I'll have to wait and see how long this setup lasts. I'll know it is fixed when it doesn't break.

As to you asside, my ISP allows multiple logins with the same userID. That is why I have each machine sign on seperately.