Network Issues

[Kevin Mullins]

I think it's boiling down to a Master Browser conflict of sorts.
Been playing around with my setup and assigned one absolute master and set the rest to not be. Meaning instead of the system being able to "elect" a master from time to time there is one and only one at all times. But that also means that that ONE master HAS to be on in order for the others to find the network. This morning was the first time that I have had all four computers seeing and accessing all four computers without a single problem or "missing" a computer.
Even after getting this pc I'm on right now to recognize the network and all the other pc's,  this pc then disappeared from two of the others. (wtf??) And then i left all the machines on and all it did was sit overnight and it had quit working again. Whether it was because the "master" at that time went to sleep or whatever causing it to try and elect a new master I have no idea. (causing a conflict somehow)

So basically what I did was set this pc as the master and all the others to not be eligible, then rebooted everything and ALL was working without even a hiccup.

Might be worth playing with..... keeping in mind that whichever is set to master has to be on at all times and also while rebooting the others.

Go to START then RUN .... regedit.exe

Find:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Browser\Parameters and change the "Maintainserverlist" value to "TRUE" for the MASTER.

And then:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Browser\Parameters and change the "Maintainserverlist" value to "FALSE" on all the rest.

Default is AUTO and I haven't tried each pc on auto one at a time to see if there is one particular machine causing any sort of conflict. I might check into that, but of course that would be a lengthy investigation of trial and error.

[saint]

In addition to trying a different NIC, if you can try a crossover cable directly between the cocktail and the main machine. If it works with a crossover cable then you may have some sort of router issue, though I doubt it since communication works one way.  You try swapping the NIC yet?

Thats a decent suggestion, as it removes the router from the equation. I wanted to add to it. If you do try a crossover, make sure to assign the machines a static IP address.

Oops, yes, what he said.

[Kevin Mullins]

Just a side note to chew on:
After getting all of mine connected properly using one as a master I went back and set all of them with the value of TRUE and all is working great still. And it doesn't matter if one of them gets shutdown and rebooted or anything in between.
My girlfriends pc is running Zone Alarm so I had to set the proper privileges for the rest of them to access it, no biggy.
I also noticed that my daughters laptop actually goes into a hibernation mode, at that time it's not accessible, once again no biggy, just noted information.

So all of my pc's registry value are now:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Browser\Parameters and change the "Maintainserverlist" value to "TRUE"

Seems like the AUTO stuff has been causing MY network fits..... so might be worth taking a look at on yours.
I'm no IT or Networking guy, but I know I racked my brains with all the usual advice and resolutions that never seemed to be the cause of the problem.
I'll monitor my progress and see if it holds up solid.

Any other suggestions or understanding of why this would happen from you other fellas?

EDIT: I have not tried "adding" a new computer to the network yet to see if it gets recognized by all the others properly. I will try that later and see what happens.
I've got another laptop we haven't used in forever that I can throw in the mix and test the theory out.

EDIT 2:
Just set the other one up, normal home network stuff...... and it popped right up on all the other pc's and can be accessed with no problems. Didn't have to reboot or anything funky like that either.

[SavannahLion]

That's interesting. In every single description I've ever read of windows networking. That particular Reg entry was never mentioned... ever. Should be worth looking into and might explain a lot of behavior that I originally attributed to the Linksys handling of DHCP addressing.

[Kevin Mullins]

Well, like I've mentioned, I'm not a network buff ..... but I've had alot of similar issues as to what Frizzle is having and I had to dig deeeeep to find what little information I could about how the Windows stuff was "supposed" to work when it's all set up correctly.
Because obviously it still wasn't working right.
And his thread got me digging into my issues some more.
Needless to say...... it's all holding up very nicely so far.

I'm curious as to how FrizzleFried is coming along on his issues. 

[SavannahLion]

I did a search on that reg entry. Apparently here's how it's supposed to work.

Setting Maintainserverlist to TRUE forces the PC to act as a master browser if no other PC is acting as such.
Setting the same to TRUE if another PC is acting as a master server list puts that PC into a backup "mode" when it sees a master on the network.

Setting Maintainserverlist to AUTO causes the PC to take over the role of a master if no other master exists or acts as a backup if not enough backups exist on the network.

Setting it to FALSE forces the PC to never hold a master or backup role even if no master browser exists on the network.

In other words, putting all the PC's on a network to TRUE causes one PC to become the master and the rest to become backups. Expected behavior for that setting. That's why it works for you when you set them all to TRUE.

So it appears there's a deficiency in how Maintainserverlist set to AUTO works. I'm going to have to try this when I get home tonight.

In any case, a quick peek through the MSDN and Technet pages, Microsoft is rather vague on how it all works. MSDN has better information on a technical basis, but hardly any nutshell information. Oddly enough, I did note that the browser list is supposed to be one master and one backup for a network with 32 or fewer PC's and an additional backup for every 32 beyond that. Seems to me that the AUTO setting can't decide which PC should act as a master and backup.

Here's a thought. Anyone with problems using non-Windows PCs in their network? Linux, Wii, PS3 perhaps? Anyone that don't have problems, are they using a pure Windows network? Just a thought, I recall my Barricade refused to list any Linux PC unless I used some hacked firmware.

Corrected annoying spelling error

[saint]

Frizzle: From a command prompt, what do you get when you do a
"net view" (no quotes)

Do you see the cocktail cabinet showing up?

What do you see if you do a
"net view w.x.y.z" where "w.x.y.z" is the IP address of the cocktail cabinet?

[FrizzleFried]

Frizzle: From a command prompt, what do you get when you do a
"net view" (no quotes)

Do you see the cocktail cabinet showing up?

What do you see if you do a
"net view w.x.y.z" where "w.x.y.z" is the IP address of the cocktail cabinet?

NET VIEW shows:

\\COCKTAIL    Cocktail
\\OFFICEPC    Office PC

NET VIEW 192.168.1.105 (cocktail address) shows:

Share name Type Used As Comment
C Disk
COCKTAIL_BACKUP Disck
F Disk
HPLaserJet Print
L BACKUP Disk

So it's seeing it!

EDIT: While NET VIEW shows both \\COCKTAIL and \\OFFICEPC,  NET VIEW 192.168.1.105 does not show anything but "System error 53 has occured. The network path was not found"... the results above were from 192.168.1.103 (the office PC)...

EDIT 2: While I posted earlier that it pinged,  I was being an idiot and pinging my office PC (103) not the cocktail (105) which is still not pinging.

[FrizzleFried]

Welp,  I can get in via IP address (\\192.168.1.103)... not sure WHY or HOW it was fixed...

\\computername isn't working though.


EDIT: I am a dumbass...I was getting in to my OFFICE PC at .103... the cocktail cab (.105) still is not pinging nor is it accessable via \\192.168.1.105...

Essentially I am at the same spot I was...but you can see the damn thing with NET VIEW.

[patrickl]

Maybe its a problem with the NetBios registration?

Verify WINS registration of client NetBIOS names

[ark_ader]

That will teach you a lesson Frizz next time you will use Bluetooth! 

[FrizzleFried]

Maybe its a problem with the NetBios registration?

Verify WINS registration of client NetBIOS names

COCKTAIL isn't appearing in the list at all...

[patrickl]

Maybe its a problem with the NetBios registration?

Verify WINS registration of client NetBIOS names

COCKTAIL isn't appearing in the list at all...

Yes,  I was going with your suggestion that you could see it on the IP address, but not by name. That would indicate that the NetBios service is not running (or is having some problem) Since you corrected that it's not working at all it's something else.

Still what do you get when on the cocktail command prompt you type:

nbtstat -n

[FrizzleFried]

See attached for the results from the COCKTAIL PC.

The OFFICE PC lists this:

OFFICEPC <00> UNIQUE Registered
MSHOME <00> GROUP Registered
OFFICEPC <20> UNIQUE Registered
MSHOME <1E> GROUP Registered
MSHOME <1D> GROUP Registered
..__MSBROWSE__.<01> GROUP Registered

Not sure why there are 3 MSHOMEs or 2 OFFICEPC's...

[patrickl]

OK, that seems fine.

Are you really really sure that there isn't a firewall somehow active on the cocktail PC? That's the only explanation I can think off as to how ping traffic is blocked in one direction only.

BTW if you have Windows XP Home running on the cocktail it could very well be that you have reduced functionality on the name resolution (ie computer won't show up automatically in the browser) and "net view" might not work either. Still "\\cocktail" should work (if you have file and printer sharing switched on and all computers are in the same group and no firewall is blocking traffic etc etc etc)

[FrizzleFried]

Nope...no firewall...and it's Windows XP Pro?!  Very very very strange...

[leapinlew]

I dunno... server service is up and running... all services related to networking that I can see are up and running.

Hey Friz,

Attached is a picture of my running services. Can you show us what yours looks like? I wanna make sure we are on the same page.

[SavannahLion]

Are you really really sure that there isn't a firewall somehow active on the cocktail PC? That's the only explanation I can think off as to how ping traffic is blocked in one direction only.

Virus scanner? I believe McAfee is particularly known for running its own firewall on top of Microsoft's.

Installing nmap on any PC other than the cocktail will let him know what ports are open on the cocktail. This at least removes the possibility of his ports not being opened, either due to a firewall, bad settings or the services running.