[devospice]

I'm hooking up a G4 in our office, which has mostly PCs in it. There are a couple old Macs still running OS9 floating around but they don't get used much. So I took one, reformatted the hard drive, and installed OSX on it. (10.2)

When I first booted up into OSX I tried to connect to our WindowsXP server and it saw it just fine. It asked me which of the shared volumes I wanted to load and I loaded the two that I need. Then I went into my Login preferences and set them to load on login. I never actually tried copying files to or from the server. I just made sure I could connect.

A couple application installs and a couple restarts later and now I can't connect anymore. It can still see the network if I go to the Go menu. But when I select one of the shared volumes it just says "Connecting to smb://192.168.0.4" and sits there until it gives up.

I downloaded an old freeware program called SMB Browser, and using this program I can mount the shared volumes from the XP server. However, it is SLOW. Copying a 70 MB file said it was going to take an hour. This is over ethernet, and I beleive all the switches here are gigabit.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm not sure where to begin.

Thanks.

->Later.....Spice

[John Strung]

Are the PC's on DHCP? If so, they won't necessarily retain the same IP numbers from one day to the next. 192.168.0.4 may no longer be a valid address for the computer you are trying to connect to.

[devospice]

We do have a DHCP server but I'm not sure where. It may be built into the cable modem. But when I use that other program SMB Browser it connects using that same IP address. The server never gets shut off anyway, so it's IP address shouldn't change, right?

The interesting thing is the PC has 4 network connections in the network window. Only one of them has an IP address for the TCP/IP entry, and it's not 0.4. It's 0.71. Or does the SMB protocol not use the IP address?

I'm not much of a Windows guru.

Thanks.

->Later.....Spice