Question : LAN locked out after ICS connection

I have a problem with a system consisting of 5 PCs on a peer to peer network, 4 of these are windows98 SE and one WindowsXP

The problem came when I introduced ICS to provide internet service for 2 of the PCs via a third one (All win98 PCs).

ICS works fine, but when either of the client PCs has made an internet conection, the server PC looses the network and cannot be contacted by, or contact any of the other PCs on the network until it has been rebooted.

Pings between all PCs remain ok, but nbtstsat -n on the host PC gives the following:

Node IpAddress: [192.168.0.1] Scope Id: []
NetBIOS Local Name Table

Name                       Type              Status
----------------------------------------------------
HARRIET        <00>      UNIQUE            Conflict
WORKGROUP      <00>      GROUP             Conflict
HARRIET        <03>      UNIQUE            Conflict
HARRIET        <20>      UNIQUE            Conflict
WORKGROUP      <1E>      GROUP             Conflict
HARRIET FRAZER <03>      UNIQUE            Registered

After a reboot all table entries return to Registered until the next internet connection is made.

Please can anyone explain what this means and suggest a solution

Regards John

Answer : LAN locked out after ICS connection

Were you connected to the internet at this point?
If you were, there should be a route at the top that goes,

0.0.0.0   0.0.0.0   x.x.x.x (You ISP's router)   x.x.x.x (Your internet IP)   1

Anyway, this is beside the point as you would experience the opposite (LAN but no internet) if this was the problem.

What are you using for name resolution, DNS/Wins? Is your internet sharing software using it's own built in DNS server / relay.

Anyway, to further analyse your nbtstat/netbios side,

00 Unique is the Workstation Service
00 Group is the Workgroup/Domain Name

03 Unique and 03 Unique are both the messenger service

20 Unique is the File Server Service

1E Group is the Browser Service Elections



If your pc was the master browse you would see a

1D Unique

in the list.

You would also expect to see a

__MSBROWSE__ 01 Group

in the list as I am assuming it would be the only master bowser and therefore the domain master browser.

So I dont think the master browser service is a problem. Check you other machines to see that one of them does have the settings mentioned above.

If you run a WINS server you can see which computers are creating a conflict. Do you have an LMHOSTS file set up? NetBios uses this also for name resolution.

Also, have you checked the system event log in Win XP for any messages about conflicts.

And I know this may sound crazy, but cheque that all your network cards have unique MAC addresses.

Another thing to try is setting

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetBT\Parameters\NoNameReleaseOnDemand

with a value of DWORD value of 00000001. This should stop your machine from releasing its netbios name when another machine requests it. If you change this and another machine suddenly stops working then we know where the conflict is occurring.

Thats everything I can think of right now. If anything else comes up I will post it up here. Let us know how you get on with the above.