Hello, I'm fairly new to network maintenance, currently operating as an intern for a non-profit organization. I have several problems, but will only address the most important one at this time. I recieved a call from the director that some of the computers were were having issues connecting to the network. After looking at them I found that many of the computers won't accept the "student" profile's password and at the same time many of the other computers will. I was going to attempt to delete and recreate the "student" profile on the server machine (is this necessary?), however when I went into the Server room and pressed alt+ctrl+delete, I got an IP Conflict error message and it won't let me log into the server. I am pretty sure this is the reason why half of the computers won't either accept a password or connect to the internet. I really have no idea what to do from there. Agaain, I am very new to this and could use any advise I can get. Thanks

I got an IP Conflict error message and it won't let me log into the server. I am pretty sure this is the reason why half of the computers won't either accept a password or connect to the internet. I really have no idea what to do from there. You don't say how many PC's in the environment but in the case of your server having an IP conflict I would say you need to start by going around, shutting off all PC's and then reboot your server, let it come up and login to it. With no idea of how you're setup I can only say this. A server's IP should always, always, always be statically assigned. If you're using DHCP you want to ensure that your server is using a statically assigned IP that's outside of the DHCP scope. If you're using all static IP's in your environment, as you go to shut each PC off, make a not of it's IP and hostname so you can figure out who the offender is. If you're using DHCP, once you have the server back up and running, check in the Even Viewer. You'll find the error pertaining to the IP conflict. Open and read that and write down the MAC address of the offending PC that caused the conflict (it will be included in the IP conflict error message) and then go find it. If you look, you'll probably find some dufus decided to statically assign it an IP and happened to pick the one the server was using. Regardless. You have to make a choice betweeen using DHCP or statically assigning IP's within your network. DHCP is a better method as it reduces the number of these types of issues.

It's a children's learning center, most of the people that use it are under the age of 13. They have about 20 computers on the network. I'm not sure if it's static or DHCP, but it had been working fine for almost 2 years now. I'm going up there tomorrow to work on it, thanks for the advice. One concern is that these kids are installing online games on the computer's that aren't working cause it seems limited to those PC's, and that's basically all the kids use them for. Do you think that shutting everything down as you suggested will also fix the password issue on many of the computers, or do you think that's a whole separate issue?

"One concern is that these kids are installing online games" I can not begin to express how bad of a setup this is. If they can do this your network is infected with spyware and possibly virus's. It may also be vunerable to being hacked. Concerning your question about the password issue, it would appear everyone is only using one account from your description. If that account works on some but not all the problem is on the workstations that don't work. You would not recreate the student account in this case. If you have more than one server it could be those workstations were trying to connect to the server with the ip conflict which means the servers network wasn't available. No network = no logon. Odds are though the problem is infected workstations. Hopefully they have been running AV on the server(s) or you may have a very long day(s) ahead of you correcting the issues.

That's what I figured. So what do I need to do, run AV on the server then all the workstations individually?? Thanks alot for the help...

Get the latest AV and spyware updates and scan ALL machines. I would even cut the internet until this was done. I would also look for root kits and bot nets. Next really important aspect is your ip addressing documentation and correcting your dhcp scope. Consider a firewall that supports AV/spyware subscriptions so incoming/outgoing traffic is cleaned/monitored.