Every other Monday, AdminRepublic poses a systems or network problem requiring a solution. Some challenges are routine, while others may be more difficult. We then conduct a random drawing from the correct responses and send one lucky winner a fancy new TechRepublic T-shirt. You’ll be the envy of the office. Let’s start with the solution to our previous challenge.
How can Denise get her NIC working?
Two weeks ago, we presented Denise’s Debacle. As you may remember, she couldn’t get a network PC Card working on a Windows NT Workstation laptop. The network card’s dongle light blinked intermittently, and since she’d tried it in another machine and it had worked fine, she knew the hardware wasn’t faulty.

The fix? Denise needed to specify the correct IRQ for the NIC, as both the NIC and soundcard requested IRQ 5.
Download TechRepublic’s “IRQs At-A-Glance” checklist .
The dongle light appeared because the PC Card received power and a network connection, but it blinked because it wasn’t able to communicate properly with the OS.

Congratulations to Eric Young, whose winning entry was randomly drawn from the correct submissions received.

The next challenge
System administrator and TechRepublic reader Trent Cook sent in this week’s AdminChallenge.

Hal’s having trouble with the Win 9x clients on his network. For security reasons, he unbound file and print sharing from the TCP/IP adapters on his Windows NT Server running SP4. Then, he installed NWLINK (IPX/SPX) to run LAN file- and print-sharing tasks.

Everything seems to be fine, but when he logs onto the Windows NT server and goes to Network Neighborhood, he can’t see all of the Win 9x PCs on the network.

What simple action will enable his NT server to see all the workstations while still maintaining his TCP/IP security settings?

Send your answer to TechRepublic by Monday, Feb. 21, 2000. We’ll send a TechRepublic T-shirt to the individual whose name we randomly select from all the correct answers received.

Now the legal stuff
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