Please help diagnose: Can't ping other networked computers by name.
 

Every so often Samba (or Konqueror) looses its grip on the network.
Konqueror says "internal error" -- but I don't think it's a problem with Konq because Nautilus can't connect either.

All the other machines on the lan are Windows XP.
(I normally use Konq with smb:/ for handy dragging and dropping across the lan.)
I am not actually running KDE, (using IceWM) but I still use Konqueror.

The only solution I have found is to reboot, but even that didn't work last time.

Stangely, when I try smbtree from the command line it still correctly reports all the other boxen with their names and IPs.


I get dynamic IPs from the modem/router.
resolv.conf contains:
search localhost
search local
nameserver 192.168.1.2

(Seems correct to me.)



I can ping internet sites by name or IP.
I can ping the other computers by IP address.
I can ping localhost by address, or 'localhost' or name.
But I can't ping the other computers by name.

I assume that if I can fix this, Samba with Konqueror or Epiphany will work on the network.


# hostname - is correct
# rcnetwork restart -o debug
Shows no problems to me, but does not fix the problem.

I DO have two instances of dhcpcd running: is that how it's supposed to be?

Running processes include:
dhcpcd
dhcpcd
nmbd
sshd
smpppd
nscd
smbd

edit your hosts file

I thought that editing hosts was only useful when using static ip addresses.
I mean, what will happen when the ip address leases expire?

Update: Fixed

Just in case anybody is looking:


...later in the day it was fixed...
Still can't ping by name, but it seems that's normal when you don't have static addresses.


What did I do?

took blank lines out of smb.conf (saw that recommended somewhere)
restarted network services
ifdown eth1 (turned off the broken NIC)
logged out
Restarted X
logged back in.


Don't know which, if any, of those things fixed it.
Anyway I didn't have to reboot.

I wonder if the problem really was Konqueror all the time?