Resolved Odd driver\etc\host problem

I have a LAN with several nodes on it with static IPs. For a couple of years I have had them all defined in the host file on my XP machine and access worked just fine. I recently migrated a Linux machine from Mandriva to CentOS. When I did the migration I assigned the same static IP address to the new OS, yet I can no longer access that host by name from XP (no changes there). A 'tracert' returns an unable to resolve target system name error. Accessing all the other nodes by name still work fine. I can only access the new OS by IP. I have no clue why changing the OS would prevent XP from using the host file but obviously something has changed. Can anyone help me trouble shoot this? TIA.

 

Thanks for the suggestion but no joy.

 

Thanks again. It is accessible by name from other systems so it has to be something with this particular XP.

 

Thanks but still no joy.

 

Thanks for the reply. I am not sure I understand what you are suggesting. Do you mean 'netstat -rn'? That looks normal to me. If you are talking about something else, I don't know what "mandriva comps min client lists" are or how to find any.

 

I didn't think about the router. However, I have a Linksys and I do not see a way to get or clear any cached data. I did try to reset the router but that didn't help. Its my opinion that the hostname is never really being resolved in the XP host. It behaves like it is simply ignoring that entry in the host table.

 

I suppose that was a long shot at best but still no success. I think I need to more closely analyze how I got to this point. Previously everything was working as expected. I then migrated my Linux to a new distro. Post install my Windows XP SEEMINGLY can no longer resolve the original name of the Linux box into an IP. However, I can access it fine with the IP address. So what are the possibilities? Since the only thing that changed was the Linux box it seems logical that the problem lies there. I am going to have to pursue it from that point (CentOS forum) next but I might be back. In the mean time thanks for all the replies.

 

What's the hostname of your Linux box ? It should be computername.domainname & NOT localhost.localdomain

 

TonyT nailed it. This indeed turned out to be a Workgroup issue. The Samba config on the Linux machine had the workgroup misspelled (typo). It seems that Windows XP does not use the host file at all.