I wonder if anyone can give me a CLUE as to what's going on with my machines? i have two machines supposedly networked through a hub on a workgroup. Everything was fine at first but all of a sudden i started to get error messages when tryiong to connect to each other such as "the list of servers for this workgroup are unavailable"..... I can ping the IP addresses of both machines but it will not ping the names...is this an indication of something not quite right? Many thanks to anyone who first understands it and secondly replies. Thanks M Baxter UK

Resolving Netbios names (the computers names) to IPs doesn't work. You can use a lmhosts file (static) or WINS. c:\windows\lmhosts or c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\lmhosts Maybe ICS is giving you the probs, because it installs a small DHCP server, which CAN scramble up your IPs.

Thanks blumini, entering the names in the 'hosts' file on both machines now means that I can succesfully ping from both ends by either IP or NAME, which is a start! However, one machine simply shows itself on the network, whilst the other keeps popping up an error msg: "myWorkgroup is not accessible The list of servers for this workgroup is currently unavailble" sorry to be a pain, but any ideas? i'm running win2000 Pro on both machines, i've checked the hub on another system and its fine, the workgroups are fine, spelling etc....and i've even reinstalled the network cards on both machines many thanks Mark Baxter

Hey Mark, I think the browser service is not running properly. Can you search computer ? Start > Search > Computer > mycomp Try: Start > Run > \\mycomp Read message 1607 on this forum, response #6 Check the browser service with browstat.exe and/or browmon.exe. These programs come along with the NT reskit, but I think they work under w2000 as well.

all seems fine but if you are running win9.x operating systems use share level access control instead of user level access control that should do rgds vikram

Thanks for your help guys, still no joy but thanks anyway. I'll try again soon... regards MB

I am reposting this under a new heading "List of servers not accessible" MB