XP or Aloha problem?

[AlohaWahini]

Hi all, disappeared from the forum for a while (job change), but now I am back!

Here's the scoop. Customer with version 5.3 running on XP Pro with 5 terms. Everything appears to be ok, but I have one weird problem. I can't access the front of house terminals from the back of house across the network. I can always see them, but when I click on them, I get a message about the network resource no longer being available, you might not have permissions, etc. If I reboot them, I can gain full access for an undetermined amount of time. But eventually, if I wait a little while, the same thing will happen again.

The permissons seem to be fine, as near as I can tell. And the system, for the moment, seems to be fairly normal, but I know this shouldn't be happening and want to get to the bottom of it in case it becomes a problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

 

[AlohaWahini]

btw, all terminals running win98 se.

 

[jjr2144]

Netbui or TCP IP?

 

[AlohaWahini]

TCP. I did fix this one, but the answer kind of suprised me. Anyone have any guesses?

 

[AdamDR]

The suspense is killing me!! What was it???? (Sarcasm)

No really, what was the problem?

 

[AlohaWahini]

LOL. Ok, I deserved that one. Just trying to add a little excitement to the forum, and I guess I failed.

Apparently, the official solution is to edit the HOSTS file to contain the netbios-to-TCP names of the terminals. I found this out after the fact. But in a round about way, I stumbled upon the same solution. I told the terminals that the XP box (i.e. the back of house) was the Default gateway. At this point, my assumption was that XP--being the most recent OS--was probably going to be the master browser. In this way, the terminals would constantly announce their prescense to it, and thus eliminate problems with the terminal seeing each other.

It has worked beautifully so far!