I recently upgraded all of my 30+ PC’s in the office to Windows XP Pro. They all have static private class “C” (192.168.1.x) addresses and unique hostnames. I also have a Netware server and each PC has the CSNW.
Just the other day I noticed in my firewall traffic log (a PC running SonicWall’s ViewPoint) that most of the traffic is coming from a host named “loopback”. As it turns out, the PC that is logging this information thinks that many of the PC’s on the network are “loopback”.
After discovering this I pinged most of the PC’s on the network by IP address on a few different PC’s. Some XP some 2K. The some of them result in “pinging loopback [192.168.1.x] with 32 bytes of data”. However, if I ping by hostname it responds with the correct IP address.
I have a WINS server but it doesn’t make a difference if WINS is setup in the client or not.
One last thing….when I browse the network neighborhood, I can see all the proper NetBIOS names.
Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Dan