XP Machine Can't Ping Itself

[Galant]

Hi Guys,

Got a bit of a mystery going on.

I have three machines hooked up in a simple network. Each one connected to a basic modem router via LAN.

Two of the machines are playing nicely with one another and have internet access also, one of the machines though is behaving oddly.

I should mention that this is a new setup, so no history to fall back on.

The problem is that the third machine will not connect to the network.

Symptoms/Test Results:

Visual Hardware check - the ethernet port shows activity when a cable is plugged in.

Cable check - Cables are working fine. Same issue shows up no matter what cable is used.

IP Configuration - When left to auto assign an IP address it fails - it ends up with a "limited or connectivity" error. If I assign an IP address to it the machine it appears to establish a connection. It shows data movement back and forth.

Router Diagnostics - The router is basic but the utilities of the router are capable of a simple Pass/Fail test on the ethernet connections. Whichever port is used the connection to the problem PC 'passes', although I do not know what that specifically confirms.

Ping - The problem PC has never been able to ping any of the other two machines. I once saw it achieve 50% success in pinging the router, although since then it has failed 100% of the time. The machine also usually fails to ping itself, although again, I once say a 50% success rate in pinging. (All of this when running from the manually assigned IP).

At this point I am beginning to think the network adapter is bad or maybe the driver, but I thought one of you might know of some sort of Windows XP setting or service that might affect this.

Anyone have any ideas?

Cheers.

[DDY]

Try updating the network controller drivers on the problematic machine.

Can the computers ping each other when they're directly connected? Set IP addresses manually of course.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thats a load of Pong.

[OilSheikh]

Winsock XP fix - Download and run!

[Galant]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the input. Tried just about everything - Winsock fix included. No real success. Managed to get it to ping itself consistently and noticed it seemed to be sending but not receiving data. Didn't have the time to spend troubleshooting any further. I've pulled the machine and replaced it with a spare for now. Will take a deeper look another time or maybe just rebuild it.

[Elvo]

Like DDY said. This is most likely a driver issue. Unless within the properties of the nic it is set to static assignment?

When you say ping itself do you mean via loopback ? - 127.0.0.1. This is effectively what you would be pinging even with a known assignment i.e. 192.168.1.5. The traffic will never leave the box.

[Kaelan]

IF you are doing the above^ - Check your .hosts file, it may be that you somehow managed to get 127.0.0.1 aliased/routing to something weird.