Wierd Problem on school network

FSL

The local school has a mixture of XP Pro(4), Xp Home(2), Windows 2000(3), and Windows 98(4). All were happily sitting on the network communicating with the internet and seeing the shared printers. Now 3 of the Windows 98 machines connect to each other but not to the rest of the network. They can still see the internet and are assigned ip addresses in the same range as the rest of the network, by the education service network. All the network settings on the W98 machines are identical they are all running windows 98 version 2.

I have tried moving the three offending machines into a different work group, re-booting and then moving them back to the original work group and re-booting but they still cannot connect to the rest of the network, only to each other.

I have also changed the work group name on all of the machines but this did not work either. The three machines appear to be in the same work group as the rest, there is no firewall on the W98 machines, yet they still just see each other.

It's illogical you cannot have two distinct work groups with the same name name on the same network.

There must be a simple reason why all the XP/W2k and one W98 machine network correctly and three W98 machines don't.

Has anybody any ideas?

Urban Weigl

You should not still be using Windows 98, it's a very bad idea as support for it has been dropped. This is especially a concern because it means Microsoft is no longer releasing security updates, so you are essentially leaving yourself wide open.

DublinWriter

I've seen this before a good number of years ago.

AFAIK it is related to something to do with the netbios protocol not being used in Windows versions NT2000 and up.

You really don't want to go the netbios route on your newer machines, apart from leaving them vunerable security-wise, it can also impact network performance.

Try and up your Windows 98 PCs to Windows 2000 at least.

Again, I could be completely wrong with the netbios thing, but your problem rings a bell.