[spacemonkey504]

If anyone has any ideas i would appreciate.

This morning when i came into work everything was fine everyone had connectivity to the local network and the Internet. At 9:30 one of the workers PCs simply dropped it's Ip address and refused to renew it. There was an error message that said something to the affect of the IP address your trying to use is already in use, which makes no sense to me because the PC set up for dynamic IP address so shouldn't the router simply give it another. Anyway I have a big enough range of addresses set up in the router and nothing has changed on the network in 6 months. I rebooted, same thing so i went into the properties of the NIC and assigned a manual address instead of dynamic and now I can get on line but I still don't like the fact that I'm working around an error instead of fixing it. The machine is an XP home ( I know) and the only thing that has changed is that he installed the new Norton AV which claims that it has new protection against Worms and Spyware. Also the hub he's PC is connected to is shared by 4 other PCs and linked to another switch with more PCs on it and everyone else is up and running

Thanks in advance for any help or leads, Spacemonkey

[hulala.[uk]]

well thats easy, try pinging the same ip that seems to be duplicated on the network then do arp -a and find out mac address of that machine, find it, check its setting i bet you it will have fixed ip set up assign it back to dhcp on both machine and bobs your uncle;)

[spacemonkey504]

The thing is ( I guess I should have stated this ) is that after the PC dropped its current IP it wouldn't pick up another not even a private IP address (All 0's) and none of the PCs in the office are set to fixed except my server and it's been this way for a year, w/no problems.

[hulala.[uk]]

if it popped up with "duplicate IP" warning - then look for another machine with fixed IP if you cant ping the same IP when your problem machine is off then you shouldnt have any more problems just /release /renew IP. if it cant renew ip then it should give you an error message, which one?

[spacemonkey504]

OK,
the saga continues
My tech PC did the same thing today, I could still get online but the error message that the IP address is being used came up. There is no conflict all of the PCs on the network are accounted for and there's only one static IP address on the network and that's not the same IP address as the PCs with the conflict.

Also something I found on the DHCP router table I thought was weird. Everyone's computer name is coming up fine except for one and it's coming up with a computer name (not the PC with the conflict) that is symbols (a cross and a square) kinda like something out of wingdings font, this is not the name of the PC does anyone know what this is. thanks

[Phurious]

Sounds as if it is time to reset the DHCP server, whether that be a server or router, and release/renew/reboot the machines.