Comment #1363

2007-12-02T11:46:08Z

Sorry for the confusion. I discovered the problem from the 98 machine, but the main machine is XP and so is the other one, and the network wasn't showing up on them, either. Since we did several reboots, maybe it was the 12-minute thing that finally clicked during the movie.

Comment #1362

2007-12-02T10:23:10Z

Win98? Well there's your problem.

Does Microsoft still provide updates for win98? I thought they stopped support for 98 a long time ago.

Comment #1361

2007-12-02T03:47:55Z

You don't have to feel too bad, because that is pretty much the official answer from Microsoft about Windows networking without a domain - it may or may not work, it wasn't really designed to do file sharing like that...

That is what they used to say in the days of Windows 95 and 98, so perhaps they would not say the same thing now, but since you are connecting to a 98 machine, I expect the answer hasn't changed. If you make the XP machine the master browser (which it should be - windows machines hold an election every 12 (I think) minutes about who the master should be) the network should be reasonably reliable.

When I have a mixed network containing 95 and 98 machines and I want to have the highest probability of windows file sharing working, I always make sure to boot an xp machine by itself first, and let it sit a while, and then boot other machines. It might be the case that a windows machine also forces an election when it boots up, so the timing of booting makes a difference.

And on a large campus of machine holding elections on every boot up, the network can get quite confused, which is where I got most of my windows networking knowledge. (The work I did in Hillsboro wasn't knowledge - it was just reboot any machine that didn't work, since that usually fixed it, but people still paid us to fix their networking problems...)

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