dhcpNodeType

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jason
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J

Jason

I inherited a used Toshiba notebook running XP SP2. After endless
fiddling, I still could not get it to show up in my local, home
workgroup comprising four other XP systems (two XP home, two XP Pro). It
was "visible" in My Network Places, but trying to open it always
reported that the network path was unavailble and questioned whether
permissions were set correctly. I finally tracked the problem down after
much newsgroup searching. One of the NetBT parameters in the registry,
dhcpNodeType, was set to "peer to peer," which from what I read means
the machine had been configured for a WINS domain server environment.
(This makes sense; it had been used in a local university network.)
Changing the registry value to 8, "hybrid" solved the problem. (I
checked the other four machines at home and they all reported "hybrid"
for that parameter.) The questiion is: why didn't re-configuring all the
networking settings change this value? I didn't enable WINS name
resolution.

?
Jason
 
Jason said:
I inherited a used Toshiba notebook running XP SP2. After endless
fiddling, I still could not get it to show up in my local, home
workgroup comprising four other XP systems (two XP home, two XP Pro). It
was "visible" in My Network Places, but trying to open it always
reported that the network path was unavailble and questioned whether
permissions were set correctly. I finally tracked the problem down after
much newsgroup searching. One of the NetBT parameters in the registry,
dhcpNodeType, was set to "peer to peer," which from what I read means
the machine had been configured for a WINS domain server environment.
(This makes sense; it had been used in a local university network.)
Changing the registry value to 8, "hybrid" solved the problem. (I
checked the other four machines at home and they all reported "hybrid"
for that parameter.) The questiion is: why didn't re-configuring all the
networking settings change this value? I didn't enable WINS name
resolution.

?
Jason
Click to expand...

Jason, the dhcpNodeType registry value and WINS name resolution are
two different, independent settings. Changing one of them has no
effect on the other one.

As you've found, the "peer to peer" node type (which Microsoft should
actually have called "point to point") doesn't work without a WINS
server. I've seen many cases where the node type gets set to that
value, but I haven't been able to find out what's doing it. Nice job
of problem solving.
--
Best Wishes,
Steve Winograd, MS-MVP (Windows Networking)

Please post any reply as a follow-up message in the news group
for everyone to see. I'm sorry, but I don't answer questions
addressed directly to me in E-mail or news groups.

Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Program
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com
 
I have the same problem currently. I have to connect to a VPN server that uses one of the Symantec Clientless VPN appliances. After each successfull connection my DhcpNodeType changes to 2 (peer), and of course it screws up local networking. As a workaround I manually delete this registry key and run ipconfing /renew after each VPN session, but this is indeed very very annoying. Symantec's support basically said "shut up boy, it works for us, and if it doesn't work for you - this is your problem."

Would be very gratefull if anyone can suggest some automated way of restoring dhcpnodetype after VPN sessions.

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