We had a long power outage over the weekend and that being the only thing that would be different from last week.

Anyway, I now have a couple of PCs that state "A duplicate name exist on the network." and will not connect to the network. I also have one that when trying to connect to the SAMBA shares I receive a message "Error occurred while reconnecting. Microsoft Windows Network. THe local device name is already in use."

Uhm, I'm a little miffed.

Like I said in the opening the only difference from a SAMBA network screaming right along on Friday and bumping along on Monday was a power outage over the weekend. And we have several PCs that are working with the SAMBA server as they should!

Any comments?

Oh, only XP Pro or Win2000 Pro are afflicted. All desktops have Static IP addresses. Pings work from everywhere. I've turned off the QoS protocol on one pc and I don't receive the Duplicate name message. However, it also doesn't connect to the network! Is there some other information that would be useful?

Check the hostname of the samba PCs to make sure its not localhost. You can add a netbios name to the smb.conf file.

The PCs that are having trouble are Window XP and Windows 2000 Pro versions. The domain names associated with the NICs are correct. The IP addresses are unique. Also, they do have unique machine names.

Would it do any good to delete the user and machine names on the Linux server and rebuild them.

I found an IP issue with two PCs. Due to a couple of PCs that were still polling DHCP while the others had static IPs. Due to the power outage the DHCP server in the router restarted.... ? So, I've fixed that from happening again.

Anyway, I fixed the IP addresses in two PCs and they are now all better. It also seemed to fix a third which is now working. Unfortunately, there are two others that are still grumpy and not seeing the domain.

Any ideas. I've reinstalled the network card and drivers. Set the IP address to be unique! And they are still complaining of "A duplicate name on the network".

?