I have a local network with about 8 machines currently, all running XP Pro except for a single Windows 2000 Server machine. The machines are all inside a firewall (a simple D-Link box).
The network is a simple workgroup with basically default settings all round (only exception is that some of the machines have static IP addresses rather than using DHCP).
Everything has been working fine for months, but recently one laptop lost the ability to resolve machine names to reach others on the network.
That is if I type "\\mycomputer\myshare" explorer comes back *immediately* with network path was not found.
If I type "\\192.168.0.12\myshare" the connection works just fine. The IP addresses work fine for all machines on the network and all of the other machines can reach each other by name.
The problem is also symmetric -- none of the other machines can reach the problem laptop by name and all of them can reach it through its explicit IP address.
To confirm this is just a problem with name resolution I found an explanation of how to set up the LMHOSTS file and doing that allows me to connect to machines that I explicitly add to that file...but that's a kludge and doesn't help with other machines reaching this laptop.
The likely culprit was that this laptop was recently configured to support a dial-up connection when travelling (normally it connects to the internal LAN via either a wired or wireless path, both have the name resolution problem).
The dial-up connection was initially configured to use the "Internet Connection Firewall". From my reading online this seems like it could be a problem (even though this connection is not in active use) so I have turned it off and made sure it's disabled for all of the other network connections (the ethernet and wireless links that are actually in use).
The fact that the access is failing immediately convinces me that there's some dumb setting that got changed on the machine and needs to be reset...but I'm damned if I can find it.
BTW, the "Computer Browser" service shows up as being "started".
Anybody actually understand how this whole name resolving mess works and can help me debug this problem?
Thanks,
Doug
