I work for a non-profit charity organization that has only a peer-to-peer network. At first, their 17-20 workstations, all Win 95/98, were using just Netbeui, later added TCP/IP when a local cable company/ISP provided and configured their internet connection. This ISP apparently distributes IP addresses to these workstations, which is evident when running winipcfg. The host name displays as computername.cinci.rr.com. For a very long time under this configuration, all PCs could see all the other workstations in this small network.
We later received a grant and purchased 16 additional workstations, all XP Prof. Since then, we have recently been hearing from our 95/98 users that some of their workstations can only see part of the network when browsing Network Neighborhood. It seems to come and go, but is troublesome, where the users can’t connect to printers or other workstations. One time a w/s can see 10 other workstations, another time, only 2 or 3. We changed out the NICs,checked network config for duplicate computer names, checked connections at the hub, changed out the LAN cable, moved the workstations to other LAN drops — still no progress.
There were no changes made to the network configuration on these 95/98units, other than the removal of Netbeui from all of them (we took off Netbeui since we felt the network already had TCP/IP and didn’t need a mixed protocol environment). Do we need Netbeui back??? And we’re wondering if the XP machines, which of course see the entire network just fine, are preventing the older w/s from browsing properly.
Not sure where to troubleshoot this one, it seems to be just happening at random. Kind of running out of ideas, could anyone help?
Thanks in advance!