Moved into the new house a couple weeks ago and got my network setup
and I'm having some problems that I can't pin down. Mainly, network
connectivity between my two windows machines really, really sucks.
Can't even stream one single mp3 without hitches and remote desktop
loses connection all the time.
Setup
Two main machines: my desktop called Tbird and my media server called
Media. Both Win2k SP2. There also 2 laptops, one Ubuntu box and one
Macbook. Both of those are just fine.
I am using the Airport Extreme router which has worked awesomely in
the past. Media is hooked in on a wired connection, Tbird and the
Macbook wirelessly using 802.11-n cards, the Ubuntu machine on a -g
cards. There is also a printer shared off of Tbird.
Symptoms
Can't browse the network. Only machine that shows up is the Macbook.
Can't map the printer from anywhere on the network other than Tbird.
Itunes chugs really, really slowly when running on Tbird (all song
files are on media). Firefox uses 100% CPU time anytime a page is
loaded or refreshed on Tbird.
Internet access (other than the firefox slow downs) works just fine
and there seems to be no problems except with file transfer on the LAN
itself.
Troubleshooting
I went digging into the Event Viewer because I had come across
browsing problems about a year ago. Basically what was happening was
that the two win2k machines were fighting with each other over who was
the master browser. It kept forcing elections and the end result was
neither had the list and you couldn't browse the network shares or
computers. The solution was a registry hack to set one to always be
the master and the other to never be the browser.
Looking in the System log from Tbird I see the following errors
getting repeated. These three errors all occur with the same
timestamp:
Your computer was not able to renew its address from the network (from
the DHCP Server) for the Network Card with network address
7A79059F808C. The following error occurred:
The semaphore timeout period has expired. . Your computer will
continue to try and obtain an address on its own from the network
address (DHCP) server.
Your computer has lost the lease to its IP address 5.159.128.140 on
the Network Card with network address 7A79059F808C.
Followed a few minutes later by:
The browser service has failed to retrieve the backup list too many
times on transport
\Device\NetBT_Tcpip_{A664CFE2-8024-4A68-A29F-2AC9E5957255}. The backup
browser is stopping.
And these pop up a lot as well:
The browser service has failed to retrieve the backup list too many
times on transport
\Device\NetBT_Tcpip_{A664CFE2-8024-4A68-A29F-2AC9E5957255}. The backup
browser is stopping.
TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of
concurrent TCP connect attempts.
The system event log from Media shows the following errors:
TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of
concurrent TCP connect attempts.
The browser service has failed to retrieve the backup list too many
times on transport
\Device\NetBT_Tcpip_{A664CFE2-8024-4A68-A29F-2AC9E5957255}. The backup
browser is stopping.
All told there errors occur in bunches every few hours over the last
couple weeks.
Suggestions short of uninstalling and reformatting? I hopefully will
be building a new system in the next month and really don't want to go
through that exercise twice.
--
Brian Weeden
