Strange behavior in Network Browsing Applications

Question

I believe this is somewhat related to my other question, Leopard Network Shares and Browsing are unreliable.

I believe the problem is being caused by our network, because we're seeing problems in our house network on all computers.

• On OSX, Leopard's network shares are unreliable, as mentioned in my question.

• On Windows, the "View Workgroup Computers" screen does not show all of the current computers on the network. Not all current computers show up, and/or computers that aren't even connected are showing up in the list.

• Name resolution is flakey. Sometimes I can't connect to server but I can connect to server's IP address manually.

I believe the problem has something to do with our ISP (Cox) and the DNS configuration we're using. We're using Open DNS, and all the computers are on DHCP.

What can cause these issues? What tools can I use to diagnose the issues that we're seeing?

Answer 1

From the sounds of it you may have set each pc to do it's own dns lookup on opendns through their individual network configuration screens. Probably a better way to do it would be to set the DNS settings on your router to be the opendns servers then configure the clients to use the router as the dns server. This would allow the router to name resolution for the local network while still using opendns for remote connections.

As far as the issues with the workgroup goes I think that is down to one PC declaring itself the master browser in the network and storing the different computers connections see this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My%5FNetwork%5FPlaces

If you have one PC which is on all the time turn off the computer browser service on all the others to force that one to be the master browser.