Networking Name Resolution Issue

[ArtShapiro]

Nothing particularly to do with Thinkpads, but I sure could use a network-saavy soul here.

Have a fairly traditional network at home: a Belkin "Vision N" router with two wire-connected machines, my primary desktop and a commercial Windows Home Server box that backs everything up daily. There's a networked printer wired in as well. A bunch of thinkpads talk wirelessly through that router, although if I happen to be in the room with the router I'll use the fourth, dangling cable from the router because that's faster than the wireless.

Recently (undefined term) something has gone wrong. With the exception of the WHS backup machine, which is working just fine, all the other machines can't ping each other by name. Any ping from a command prompt, whether the name is legit or is made up, instantly return with the exact same address: 72.215.225.9, which seems to be registed to my ISP, cox.net, but has nothing to do with my actual IP address. So whether I ping one of my own machines or ping garbagename, that same IP address is returned. As a consequence, I can't map network drives by name, or remote-desktop by name. Happily these things work fine by IP address, all 192.168.2.xxx on this network.

I've put a couple critical mappings in my HOSTS file, but obviously I shouldn't have to do this.

This is a workgroup with a consistent name on all machines, with no domain involved. The machines are a mix of XP Pro and Windows 7. Only the WHS machine has a static address, as I thought it might make my life easier; the others use DHCP administered by the Belkin router.

Does this symptomology ring a bell with anyone?

Art

[RealBlackStuff]

Almost sounds as if NAT is not enabled.

[msb0b]

Try restart the router and have each client computers renew the DHCP lease.

If that doesn't work, reset the router to factory default and reconfigure.

You may also want to check if this is a known issue, and if it is addressed in a newer version of firmware.

[ArtShapiro]

Try restart the router and have each client computers renew the DHCP lease.

If that doesn't work, reset the router to factory default and reconfigure.

I talked to a networking deity at work for over an hour, getting a numbing tutorial on protocols, network layers, etc., etc. He was certain, after a long talk, that it wasn't any sort of DNS problem. He suspected that if I looked at the netbios cache (nbtstat -c) that I'd find the strange address there.

I came home, and nbtstat came up empty. At that point, without having yet seen your suggestion, I did a factory reset of the router. Upon coming up, all the computers that I connected with wire (the reset cleared my wireless security settings, of course) worked correctly!

Not being anxious to type in the 128-bit WEP key, I loaded the router configuration from a file that I'd saved off a few months ago. That's a feature of the router. To my surprise, the problem immediately returned, with that same address appearing for all pings.

I reset the router once again, and this time decided to move up to later security technology and initiated WPA security. Obviously I had to do the same on all the laptops. But everything is working perfectly once again. Sure doesn't give me the proverbial warm and fuzzies about this fairly expensive router.

We're happy for now.

Art