Here's a puzzler

[Carl Reynolds]

Andrew Kelly wrote:

>For the sake of saving me a lot of keystrokes during config, I had
>simply added the new machines to the hosts file on my workstation and
>had quite simply mistyped and never noticed the mistake.
>I was attempting to contact IP addresses which didn't/don't exist.
>
>  
>
I had a different, but related, problem recently. About six months ago 
we switch our network from using static IPs to DHCP. After making the 
switch there was one machine on the net that we could connect to 
sometimes and other times it wasn't visible to any other machine. 
Sometimes it could see other machines on the network and other times it 
couldn't. That machine could always see the Internet connection and get 
it's e-mail and since it's a machine we don't connect to a lot I hadn't 
really looked very hard to find out why it wasn't always visible.

About two weeks ago I was doing some work on the machine and noticed 
that it was giving its own IP as a different value than the one assigned 
by the DHCP server. That got me to thinking and I checked for the hosts 
file and it still had a fully populated hosts file from when we were 
using static IPs. I removed the entries (except localhost) from the 
hosts file and we haven't had any problems connecting to it since.

I hope that will help someone in the future.



Carl.