I’ve setup my own little network in my house with two windows (one XP and one Win2K) and a Linux laptop. I have the WinXP and Linux connected to my router through an Ethernet cable (the Win2K is using a wireless connection) and the router is setup as a DHCP server.

I've given the Linux box a static ip address but not the WinXP box.

WinXP box
Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.102
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1

Linux box

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:06:1B:C7:3C:4D
inet addr:192.168.1.104 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::206:1bff:fec7:3c4d/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:23155 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:17437 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:7355189 (7.0 Mb) TX bytes:8318461 (7.9 Mb)
Interrupt:16

The problem is that my WinXP laptop at times, seems to lose sight of the Linux laptop. When I ping the Linux machine from the WinXP machine it is a best inconsistent.


Thanks in advance
in nj

why don't you configure the laptop with DHCP, too?
if you need a special ip-address for it, you can still realize that
with a fixed ip-assignment to that MAC-address (in the router).
I can imagine that would end the trouble...

What distro are you using? It may also have a firewall active that may be stopping the ping packet

SuSe 9.1 Enterprise Edition and the firewalls on both boxes have been turned off.

How about the pings from the linux box to the windows box? if you want to send a whole "flood" of pings, use the -f option (with -f, each packet is represented by a "."; when a packet leaves a "." is printed, when it comes back a "." is removed; you should only see one "." at a time)

I'm guessing that it is a hardware problem. Possibly a bad cable (just a guess).