Jon Wrote: > I figured as much ... I am just baffled as to how interference would > have caused me problems accessing my lan server (which is hardwired to > the router, btw)from my laptop but not cause problems accessing the > internet. At any rate, I am thankful that my Squeezebox was having > stuttering problems, else I would have had a much tougher time > debugging this.
To speculate would be to imagine how the code might be written ... I know that Network Neighbourhood is timer driven, that is, the actual support for Network Neighbourhood resides in another process (and often in another computer if you have a decent sized network, like a workgroup). So when you open Network Neighbourhood in explorer, all that happens is a request is fired off to the other guy process (whereever it is), and a timer is started. After some period of time, looks like 30 seconds to me, if no results come back, it says "no resources available". So on a network that's dead, it won't hang forever. On a network that's marginal (and I have some), sometimes you get some of the resources, sometimes you don't. Try it twice in a row, you can get different results. I guess you'd have to say it isn't a very robust implementation. The internet doesn't go through this path, so your results will vary. Different versions of windows have different timeout periods, are more and less patient, etc. So that might explain why your wife's laptop had different results. It's actually more complex than that (if you want the whole gory story - otherwise, let your eyes glaze over). This "feature" is implemented by a service called the "computer browser service". It exists only on one computer in any group of computers. Any computer implementing "file and print sharing" can be the browser server. But there's a hierarchy. If there are 2 qualified computers, they will discover each other and play paper, scissors, stone for who gets to be the browser server. The guy who wins is the guy running the most up to date version of windows (that's a simplification, but it'll do). If you have a windows XP laptop who is sharing and goes regularly on and off the network, there will be times, when he leaves, when no one is the browser server, other times when 2 people are (briefly) the browser server, etc. Mayhem is the usual result. And, of course, all lan resources like printers and disks, are discovered using this service. So you can see if something destroys (even sporadically) network connectivity, you can have 0, 1, or 2 browser servers. In the case of 2, they can even have different ideas of what the network topology is (because neither can see the whole network, else they'd see each other and one would shut itself down). In amongst the gaping holes in this scheme, there's plenty of place to believe that a somewhat broken network could support internet access (which bypasses this whole morass) just fine and yet break access to local disks and printers. HTH -- Michaelwagner ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Michaelwagner's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=428 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22210 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
