I came this >< close to liking Windows 7 - odd connectivity issues

Factual Questions
1

So, I wanted to wipe and rebuild my Media Center PC, so I decided to use Windows 7.

It actually wasn’t bad. Almost everything went off without a hitch, which is a big old surprise when Windows is involved.

I’ve only got one HUGE problem, and that’s that I can’t access the thing over the network. The Win7 machine itself can get to the internet, but that’s it. I can’t get it to access any shares on the network, and I can’t access its shares from anywhere else on the network.

I can’t even ping it, nor can I get it to ping anything else - except the gateway. I can also ping it from the gateway.

Yes, I’ve turned off the firewall completely.

If I check my workgroup on another machine, I see the media machine (cleverly named “media”) appear in the list. Of course, if I try to open it I get a “the network path was not found” error.

I can’t even get a ping to fail if I ping via DNS entry - I just get a lookup failure.

WTF? Anyone?

It’s responding to pings, but only from the gateway. It won’t successfully ping anything else, except the gateway.

-Joe

2

Sounds like a TCPIP configuration issue.

Check that the subnet masks and address ranges match on all PCs.

When you say you cannot ping it, do you mean ping by name or by address or by both?

3

Can’t ping by either.

However, I just whipped out my XP Home netbook and it can ping both…and it’s getting its address via DHCP.

Thing is, I can ping both from the netbook, but neither desktop can ping the other. But both can ping the netbook.

This is making less and less sense.

-Joe

4

And to add more weirdness…

I switch the media PC to DHCP, still can’t reach the XP machine.

From what I can tell, the media PC can reach everything on my network (netbook, 2 wifi printers, router) EXCEPT the XP machine and a wireless print server/bridge.

The XP machine reach everything except the media PC.

If I check the ARP table on my XP machine, the MAC of the media PC is in there.

If I check the ARP table on the media PC the MAC for the wireless bridge is showing for both the XP machine and the bridge…

And now, after making NO reach changes (unless you count arp -a at two command lines) I am able to connect.

Ooohkay…anyone feel like throwing out a theory on that one?

-Joe

5

Erm, how did you get Windows 7 on your computer? The retail version doesn’t come out until late October. I am guessing this is some kind of demo or beta test version? If it’s buggy I’m not sure that it would be fair to judge the OS on a pre-release version.

6

Windows 7 Release Candidate, probably. Sorry I can’t be of help with the OP’s question.

7

Guessing here, but you’ve likely got a firewall on the XP box and not registered the MAC address of the media PC with the wireless router. One security method for wireless routers is to restrict by MAC address.

8

In the Network and Sharing Center do you have Network Discovery turned on?

9

For those of us who subscribe to Technet or MSDN, the release version of Windows 7 will be available later this week.