Network neighborhood/net view quirks

[MaxDSP]

All PCs are running WinXP Pro but both the net view command and Network Neighborhood for the domain are only seeing about 50% of the pcs on the domain, even though the ones that are missing are still pingable.

Also, after a pc name is changed, why does pinging the old name resolve to the new one? why wouldnt it just time out? Is there any way to clean up AD without pinging each machine and wait for a response?

 

[Netopia]

I don't know about that, but I've got a number of computers that show up in 9x/NT/2000 that won't show up in XP

 

[GTiBri]

What services are your servers running? DNS? WINS (only for backwards compatibility)?

From what little AD experience I have, most of the problems I've seen like that was caused by DNS problems. Of course I have a mix of machines here ranging from 98 to XP.

I would check your DNS server to see if the machines that are not showing up have entries in the DNS db. If not, run "ipconfig /registerdns" from those machines and see if they show up.

Other than that I don't know enough about your network to go any further.

edit: Oh yeah, have you checked to see if those machines have the windows firewall on?

 

[Nothinman]

Windows browsing is ass, even in a domain environment it's unpredictable at best.

Also, after a pc name is changed, why does pinging the old name resolve to the new one? why wouldnt it just time out?

Without knowing how the name was resolved it's impossible to answer. If it was resolved via DNS then you don't have DNS dynamic updates working properly or the local machine is still caching the last response. If it was resolved via NetBIOS it could either be a WINS problem, if you have no WINS it could be the master browser (usually DC in a domain) still having the old name, etc.