New router... having problems

[Spblue]

Originally Posted by Canker

Is your router's DHCP giving out it's own address as a DNS server, or your upstream providers DNS servers? If your DHCP is giving your upstream name servers, if your computers try to register with them it won't work.

I don't think he has a DNS server (other that his ISP's), so DNS cannot be used at all to resolve his office, whether through DHCP self-reg or A entries. Unless you're using your own DNS server, DHCP auto-register does nothing at all.

Originally Posted by sswilson

What OS are we talking about here?

XP has always been hit and miss for me when it comes to file/resource sharing on my internal network. It seems to work fine for a period of time, and then breaks for no apparent reason. In most cases, I've found turning file/printer sharing off and then turning it back on seems to resolve the issue.

Root cause of your initial problem is more than likely the fact that the new router assigned different ips to the PCs on the network, and the OS doesn't recognise them.

All this is caused by the browse master issue I mentionned above. Basically, by default, Windows workgroups (even with Windows 7) will use NetBIOS over TCP/IP broadcasts to locate local computers. It is also how the whole negotiation thing takes place. The problem is, whenever a browse master PC is restarted, it's supposed to gracefully re-elect another one. In practice, this seldom works. He doesn't have a whole lot of solutions:

• He can do DHCP IP reservation for all his MAC Addresses in his router so that they are always assigned the same ip and then modify the host file on all his computers.
• He can install a DNS server for his local network, but this requires a bit of technical knowledge to configure and maintain.

[Canker]

No, but most SOHO routers will let you use themselves as a name server (ie: Set the router's address as the name server address), presumably some of the more full featured routers would do more than just cache or forward, like allow clients to register themselves.

Originally Posted by Spblue

I don't think he has a DNS server (other that his ISP's), so DNS cannot be used at all to resolve his office, whether through DHCP self-reg or A entries. Unless you're using your own DNS server, DHCP auto-register does nothing at all.