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What happened? I can't see my wife's computer on the workgroup any more

F

Felecha

Golden Member
some time ago I finally managed to get my wife's laptop to work on our home network. Linksys 4-port router with my desktop and my laptop directly connected. I got her a NetGear wireless thingie and it connected her to the internet just fine but it took a while before I stumbled on whatever it was that made it so we could share files and my printer. That was good for a couple of months, and now that is lost. My laptop and desktop are still ok with each other, but I can't see hers and she can't see either of mine.

Rather, I should say that she shows up in My Network Places, but if I try to open hers in Windows Explorer I get

\\Susan is not accessible. You might not have permission . . .

All are XP, by the way. Hers is Home, mine are Pro.

Hers shows 192.168.1.100, mine are 101 and 102. I can ping both ways by IP but not by computer name. Is that a clue? But if so how does her computer name show up in the Workgroup list along with the others?

All permissions are set to Full as far as I can tell. I turned her MS Firewall off to see if that was it. nope.

I've gone through the "checklist" of all the things I can think of. I haven't done anything that I know of to change things. I've rebooted the router and the wireless and all the computers . . .

What am I missing?



 
It's not the wireless. I pulled the cable out of the wireless and straight into her laptop. Same thing - I can ping but can't get name recognition.

Both ends are Shared for C:

What can it be???

Same subnet, same workgroup, same OS, sharing is on, permissions full, . . .
 
Found a site that taught me to run "net view \\susan" and I got "error 53" which says it's a name resolution issue. Where do I go for that? In a hoime DHCP network, who is the DNS server? all my TCP\IP's are set to obtain DNS automatically and always have been.

What could have changed???

And how can the name Susan show up in Network Places in Windows Explorer if the name is unknown in net view and ping???
 
You don't have a local DNS server. You can edit your hosts file to solve most name resolution issues, though DHCP does make that process a bit trickier. The quickest way to deal with your name resolution issues is to just map a drive, using the IP in the UNC path or you could just use UNC from Run or explorer.

Start, Run. Then use this syntax substituting the remote machines IP instead of the name

\\servername would be \\192.168.1.101 for instance You can also add the share in the path. \\192.168.1.101\remotesharename What your dealing with is probably browser war problems. You can disable all but one machines master browser capability in the registry which could/should allow you to use Network Places again. You would typically allow the machine that is always on act as the master browser. I have been using windows networks for close to 10 years. I've used network neighborhood/places probably 10 times in all those years. It's junk and always has been UNLESS you have a local WINS or DNS server. Your router is not going to act as either. At least none that I have seen. Without a local dns or wins server windows uses Master Browser elections and tables, and braodcasts. In windows at least this is totally unreliable longterm.

If you don't want to deal with all that, kill all your machines and boot them up one by one slowly. Might take care of it
 
ktwebb

I never was able to follow up on this one till now. I added her IP and computer name to my hosts file and my IP and computername to hers. And now it all works again.

I got bumped to try solving it again by someone's suggestion that Norton 2005 may be the problem. I did install Norton 2005 some time ago, maybe at the time that I lost contact with hers on the network. Would it mess up the hosts file?

And I'm wondering - if some day DHCP gives us different IP's, what will that mean? It can't be that you have to manually edit all the time. I would really like to know more - in normal circumstances users don't have to mess with host files. They just read the Windows Help and scratch their heads and finally manage to set up sharing through Network Places. What's the deal behind the scenes?
 
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