Hi all,

I have a friend who's having a little trouble and I suggested that one of the braniacs *g* here might be able to help out. Here's Mark's email message to me:

Doug,

It was nice to talk with you last night. Thanks for the offer to post my network problem to levelextreme.com. Here it is:

I have a network consisting of three machines: An AMD K6-2 300 MHz running
Windows NT Server 4 (SP 5) and Small Business Server, A Pentium II 300 MHz
running Windows NT Workstation 4 (SP 5) and a Pentium 133 MHz running
Windows 98 (originally running Second Edition, but now running the original
release of 98). The NT Server provides a DCHP server.

The machines were originally connected using coax and some old NE2000
compatible ISA network cards. The network between the two NT machines has
been running very well for several months as long as the Windows 98 machine
was not powered on. However, if the Windows 98 machine was powered up, I
would sometimes get the NT Workstation machine to lock up tight (requiring a
hardware reset). I attribute this to something related to the network cards.
However, if I had just the Windows 98 machine and the NT server running,
everything seemed to work okay i.e. no lock ups.

I recently upgraded my network cards to 100 base-T. The NT Server and the
NT Workstation have 3Com 3C509B PCI cards. The Windows 98 machine has a
RealTek 8139 PCI card.

The NT Workstation machine works fine. However, the Windows 98 machine is
unable to get an IP address from the DCHP server on the NT Server. If I set
it up for a hard configured IP address, it works on the network just fine.
It also seems, (although I don't have a lot of history yet) that having the
Windows 98 machine, no longer locks up the NT Workstation.

If the Windows 98 machine doesn't have a hard configured IP address, it uses
an autoconfigure IP address. If I disable autoconfigure IP address, it gets
and address of 0.0.0.0. When the Windows 98 machine uses an autoconfigure
IP address, it can't communicate with the rest of the network.

I have tried with no success removing all the network adapters, clients and
protocols and reinstalling and doing a complete reinstall (FDISK and format)
of Windows 98, this time with the original version.

The activity lights on my hub indicate a 100 Base-T connection to all
machines. I have also verified the integrity of all the cabling with a cable
tester. The Realtek diagnostic says the card is okay, although I didn't
attempt a network or loopback test.

I attempted to examine the DCHP server log on the NT server, but it doesn't
show any activity, even though I know the NT workstation is getting
addresses and logging is enabled.

This probably isn't a major issue as I can just assign a fixed address to
the Windows 98 machine and I don't use that machine as much as the other
two.

Thanks,
Mark