IP Conflict

[Mbarb]

We are out of ideas on this. We have a network with NT servers and about 200 win95 machines. We are using DHCP for IP resolution. We have 2 machines that are having a IP conflict. Neither machine has the same nic card address or the same computer name.
Any good ideas??
thanks

[wee96]

I'm just curious, how come you use DHCP instead of assigning each computer its own address? I've always found in my experience that giving each a static ip works best. I'm not sure though about why this is happening to your boxes, but it's a good example of what I was saying.

[800XL]

Setting static IPs begins to really suck when you start talking about hundreds of workstations. DHCP is really easy to use, and allows you to do things like change the IP of your gateway without having to walk around to EVERY machine in the place.

Mbarb: Could it be that your IP scope is not large enough? Perhaps your DHCP server has run out of IPs to give out. Other things that come to mind would be the length of lease time you are giving. You can try running winipcfg on the two workstations, then 'release all' and 'renew all' to see if the problem goes away. If somehow your server has given an IP lease of say 4 hours to one machine, and then prematurely releases it (like someone changed the lease time or something) and gives that IP to another machine, you have a conflict. Most of the time, these sort of problems will resolve themselves with a reboot though. If you still have trouble with this, let us know a little more about your setup. What range of IPs are you using, subnet mask, etc. There are a dozen things that could affect this, and its kind of hard to tell from here.

[Jin Vitas]

To find out the Hardware address to IP.. and which one is causing the problem try this.

on the client with the conflicting IP.. use command prompt run arp -a see what is listed in there.. then do a Ping -a ipaddress. that will tell you which system is causing the problem.. if it comes back with the same computer name then do this.. power off that system.. then do a ping computername of that powered off one.. it should say unknown host.. then do a ping -a ipaddress of that system.. then you will come back with the computer name of the culprit.. also I would check printers with static IPs.. and anything u have that uses static IPs ..

[Jin Vitas]

Oh forgot to tell ya.. also Event Viewer will tell ya the netbios name as well.