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I support a network of WinXP machines at our local community radio station. I recently added a wifi router to the mix, and it appears to work fine behind the ADSL modem. In the process of testing both wired and wifi connectivity from my MBP, my Finder "Shared" portion of the sidebar was populated with the names of the various machines on the network, for example win1, win2, etc.. However, if I tried to mount any of these with Go to server followed by smb://win1, say, my MBP cogitated for a long time, finally throwing a "this server is down, check your network connections, etc." dialogue.

If I use an explicit ip address, eg. smb://, it works fine, ditto if I put the name/ip bind, for example " win1" in the /etc/hosts file. So it appears to be some sort of DNS problem.

But I don't understand where the names win1, win2, etc. in the Finder came from if they're not matched to a valid ip address.

I'd prefer not to have to maintain the hosts file to track the DHCP-granted ip addresses of the winXP machines. How can I do this?

Regards, David

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I'm going to guess the names are being parsed from announcements...

What do your WINS settings look like on the MBP vs. the Windows machines? Is the SMB side centralized in any way?

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