Andrew Kelly wrote:
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.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.
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.