Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general (
More info?)
"wyocowboy" <wyocowboy@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:BA60BFDD-32BF-4544-8F6C-C75513E63CF5@microsoft.com...
>
>
> "Kerry Brown" wrote:
>
>
>> If NETBEUI fixed the problem then the problem was probably DNS or NETBIOS
>> related.
>> Installing NETBEUI will sometimes help if DNS is mixed up or
>> NETBIOS is not working right. If the workstations are in a domain then
>> I'd
>> suspect DNS. If peer to peer or workgroup then NETBIOS. Installing
>> NETBEUI
>> is a bandaid for a symptom, not a fix for a problem.
>
> Well, let's take a little closer look at this...
>
> I have seen several situations where win98 machines worked reliably in
> peer2peer for years, and then XP machines were either added, or some of
> the
> 98 machines were upgraded to xp. After this happened, the 98 machines
> continued to work, but the xp did not work reliably (sometimes works,
> sometimes doesn't) when browsing shares, or trying to access persistently
> mapped drives. Didn't seem to matter whether the share was on an XP or a
> 98
> machine - xp had problems accessing them and 98 did not. Nothing changed
> with
> respect to DNS settings (the only DNS server involved was that of the ISP,
> which certainly didn't have their workstations in its database).
>
> Since there is only one configurable item in XP's Client for Microsoft
> Networking, this problem is occurring on a lower level that is not
> accessible
> to the user. Either Win98 was doing it wrong (but it worked) or XP is
> doing
> it wrong when running netbios over tcp/ip. Win2k Prof does not have this
> problem. Both Win2k and XP use the same BSD ip stack, but for some reason,
> MS
> removed Netbeui as a default choice in xp.
>
> In the domain scenario, the DC is handling DNS. Again, we have seen win98
> work without these issues and XP does not work reliably with persistently
> mapped drives. It should be noted that not all sites exhibit this problem.
> We
> have one site that is running SBS2000 and all XP workstations, using just
> netbios over tcp/ip, and they have never had this issue. The other
> customer
> has SBS 2003. Both of these are running ISA server which means they were
> going through the server to get to the internet.
>
> No problems are seen at either site accessing the internet (other than
> occasional DSL outages), so I would have to wonder why it would have a
> problem on just the local/client net. That leaves netbios...
>
> While it may seem to be a band-aid, getting the customer going is our main
> priority, and theirs. So far, Microsoft has not given me any medals or
> other
> compensation for the bugs I've found while doing field QA on their
> products,
> so there is no incentive for me to fire up the debugger and find out what
> is
> really going on when I have a fix in my back pocket. We deal with mostly
> small businesses - if I was MIS overseeing a significant number of
> workstations, I would feel differently.
>
>
I'm in the same situation, mostly small business clients who want it working
right now. I have also used NETBEUI (although I prefer IPX/SPX) as a quick
way to get things working. I let the client know what I am doing and why. In
most cases they say get it working now. In the cases where they want it
fixed properly it can take many hours of troubleshooting with browstat,
ipconcifg, and nbtstat to figure it out. It is usually a combination of many
things. Deleting all protocols on win9x machines and then reinstalling
TCP/IP and making sure only one browser master is active sometimes fixes the
problem. If it doesn't it can take a long time to troubleshoot. Also using
UNC names rather than mapped drives usually fixes the problem although some
older apps won't work this way. There definitely seems to be a difference in
the way NETBIOS over TCP/IP works with XP.
Kerry