Tech: Networking - puzzling oddities

Subject: Tech: Networking - puzzling oddities
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 01 Jan 08 - 04:36 AM

Well, this baffled me for most of yesterday evening.

I have a network at home. I had two 98SE machines and an XP Home machine talking to each other fine. I have had (but never more than 5 at once) an Me machine and a 95 machine also on the network, no probs.

The network is hard-wired (not wireless) but two machines (and it is the two puzzlers) are on "homeplug" connections that run network through your mains wiring.

A friend gave me an old Dell with XP Pro on it. The network card is a base 10 card not a 10/100 card. It's a PIII 500! I didn't know XP would run on something that slow.

Let's give names to the computers.

The 95 machine is "Dominic" (a P233)
The Me one "Rachel" (a PIII 933)
The two 98s are "Royston" (Athlon 2000) and "Richard" (Athlon 2400)
The previous XP one is "Jeff" (Celeron 2600)
The new (old) one is Sadj (PIII 500)

Both Dominic and Rachel are in pieces. I hope to put htem back together later today.

Royston Richard and Jeff can all use the internet, via my router.
Sadj can't - even with the firewall off.
No computer shows all 4 on the network. All show only 3.

Jeff can see Jeff Richard and Royston.
Sadj can see Sadj Richard and Royston.
Right now Royston can see Sadj Richard and Royston but sometimes it sees Jeff Richard and Royston in stead
Right now Richard can see Jeff Richard and Royston but sometimes it sees Sadj Richard and Royston in stead.

Ideas?

The "Home networking wizard" seems to be no use, not least because most of the machines are refusing to read floppies written in the others!

Subject: RE: Tech: Networking - puzzling oddities
From: Bernard
Date: 01 Jan 08 - 06:39 AM

It sounds as if your router DHCP has not got enough IP addresses available for everything on the network. The router should be set to 'manual' and you need to specify a range slightly bigger than your network. If, for example, your router is 192.168.1.2, you should set a DHCP range from 192.168.1.10 to 192.168.1.20 if you've got five PCs plus maybe some other stuff that needs an IP address, such as a network printer or NAS drive. You don't need to restart each PC for the settings to take effect, just open a command prompt window and type 'ipconfig /release' (note the space!) followed by Enter, then 'ipconfig /renew' (enter).

You can also use ipconfig to look at each machine to see what IP address it has before messing with the router.

I was caught out by this when I started using Netgear SC101 NAS units, as each physical drive unit needs an IP, and so does each partition... with three of these things in operation plus five mirrored partitions, I need 26 (yes!) free IP addresses just for those. Add to that my network printer, and five desktop machines...!

Hope that fixes it, 'cos I'm off out to a lunchtime session now!

Subject: RE: Tech: Networking - puzzling oddities
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 01 Jan 08 - 08:25 AM

Could be a duplicate IP addy as well. Did you assign any of them manualy? From a command prompt just type in 'ipconfig' and check what comes up on each. I am also a bit wary of the new one having a 10Mbps card - If you have a hub somewhere in there then it will run the whole thing at the slowest speed. If some of the cards are hard set at 100Mbps that will compound problems as well. If you are using DHCP to assign addies then Bernard could well be right. Although most I have seen will allocate the full compliment of 253 addies unless you chose to exclude some.

Good luck and keep us posted.

Dave

Subject: RE: Tech: Networking - puzzling oddities
From: GUEST,Richard on the Richard computer
Date: 01 Jan 08 - 09:36 AM

The one I'm normally on with my cookie is in fact the Royston machine.

Well, now everything can see the whole network (I haven't really started on the 95 machine, Dominic, yet) - it was the network via the mains that was doing it, almost certainly because I had extension leads in it. At present only the Jeff computer is on the mains network stuff.

But the Sadj computer still won't go onto the internet. I just put a new floppy drive in that and the floppy now reads. What odds I find a broken rubber band when I open up the old one! But it won't cure the internet access. It's almost bound to be some sort of access permission that's been set somewhere...

Next step is to get the Rachel machine to read its floppy too so I can format C and really clean it out - for some daft reason teh restore disk that came with it does an over the top install and doesn't really format C and until I get the floppy reading I can't use a boot disk.

Subject: RE: Tech: Networking - puzzling oddities
From: GUEST,Richard on Sadj computer
Date: 01 Jan 08 - 10:54 AM

Whoopee! Put working floppy in Sadj (hell the way you get into the old Dell Poweredges is really meccano!) and that made no difference but I could now run the networking wizard if I wanted to.

Ripped out the old 10base card (huge!) and popped in a little and rather more recent Sitecom and bingo!

Updated the free antivirus on that machine (Avast) - I try to run a different antivirus on each machine so that if one turns out to be vulnerable to one virus with luck some others wll get away with it.

Subject: RE: Tech: Networking - puzzling oddities
From: GUEST,Richard on Rachel computer
Date: 01 Jan 08 - 10:58 AM

About to rip the floppy out of this, replace, and then do a format C once I can boot from a floppy and format C!

Subject: RE: Tech: Networking - puzzling oddities
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 01 Jan 08 - 10:59 AM

And this is me on the Royston machine - the usual one....

Subject: RE: Tech: Networking - puzzling oddities
From: GUEST,Richard on Jeff
Date: 01 Jan 08 - 11:04 AM

I also just re-set preferences here and maybe AoL will stop pestering me until I have time to format C.

Off to the Rachel machine next.

After that, Dominic, the old P233 running W 95!

Subject: RE: Tech: Networking - puzzling oddities
From: Geoff the Duck
Date: 01 Jan 08 - 12:21 PM

I dislike Microsoft's obsession with "We'll do it all for you" Wizards. My big annoyance with them is that they do not tell you what they have done.
With networking, all you need to do is go in via Control Panel and find the section which sets the name of the computer ("System" 0n my computer) which brings up a multi tab "System Properties", one tab being "Computer Name" This tab has a button which allows you give the computer a network "Workgroup" and give the computer an individual name to be used by the network.
To do this, you don't need to run Microsoft's wizards at all.
Quack!
GtD.

Subject: RE: Tech: Networking - puzzling oddities
From: GUEST,Richard on Dominic
Date: 01 Jan 08 - 01:10 PM

I tend to run the wizards when I have run out of ideas. Experience teaches that setting up a network in 95, 98, and Me (the first one I tried) tends to result in thrown cups after a few hours....

XP did make it easy - but I still worry about what it says back to Mr Gates.

Hell, at this rate I'll have to get some more XP licences! - or maybe turn this old thing into Linux!

I now need to find an antivirus that will run with it without using ALL its processing power...

But here we are - all computers up and on the network - but the reformatting of the ME machine to do. I think I might do this one too - I've got a Norton 2001 somewhere that allows itself to be used free for a year after a format C (if the virus databases can still be got).

Subject: RE: Tech: Networking - puzzling oddities
From: GUEST,Jon
Date: 01 Jan 08 - 01:38 PM

I doubt you would enjoy (at least more recent desktop versions) Linux with that one unless you want to stick with text mode. The slowest machine we have is a Dell laptop which is something like a Celeron 800/256Mb Ram. I find it too slow for OpenSuse 10.3 + KDE desktop.

Other than that machine which I'm not using at the moment, the slowest we have is an Athlon XP 2000 running the above linux set up. My parents are quite happy using that one and seem to generally have a happier time than they did with its previous OS - Win 2000.

--
I have actually got Linux running on something less capable, a foxboard. Currently it's just waking up the mythtv master PC in time for a recording but it should be doing other things by the end of the year.

Subject: RE: Tech: Networking - puzzling oddities
From: GUEST,Richard on Dominic
Date: 01 Jan 08 - 03:52 PM

At the moment the problem is an antivirus on this old thing - most modern antiviroi use most of its processingpower(!) and although I found the old Norton 2001 that came with it, updates are no longer available. AVG is pretty big, and for some reason Avast is blanking me at the moment. Perhaps it remembers me from the past!

While I write this the PIII 933 is plodding through the installation of "Works", but there will be some fiddling about when it is done

Subject: RE: Tech: Networking - puzzling oddities
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 01 Jan 08 - 07:27 PM

A difficulty vaguely remembered from dim and distant past is that with Win95 and possibly with Win98, a computer that had ever been set as the "owner" of the net connection in ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) could NOT be made a non-host member without "major surgery," since there was no way to TURN OFF the "ICS hosting" on the machine. It would persist in naming itself as 192.168.0.1 - the default for the ICS host, which was quite likely to cause a "duplicate address error" when a new host was set up - even when it was a router or full blown DNS server.

There was a Microsoft Knowledge Base article giving full details, but when Win98 support "ended" most Win98 and earlier articles were expunged. Microsoft later relented, and made some older articles accessible, but I haven't been able to find that one since.

The procedure required that you use Control Panel to "remove" Internet Explorer. Since IE is an intergral part of the OS, you can't get a complete removal - just a rollback to the version that came with the OS (It was IE4 or IE4.5 when I ran it, if I recall correctly).

After rolling back, there was a specific set of files to be deleted. The KB article had a list that you could copy to notepad to create a .bat that would run the two-page(+/- ?) list.

After the "manual" (or batch) deletions, you could reinstall/repair IE using the "patch Microsoft" bit in Control Panel Add/Remove programs and your original disks, or you could just install the latest IE.

The problem may have been patched in releases since I ran into it, but is fairly likely to still exist with Win95. Even if still present, this may have nothing to do with your current problems. If not, it's just a bit of nostalgia.

John