Hosts and files show up erratically on LAN

[Mackev]

I have a LAN with four Macintoshes connected to a switch (not a router) and am seeing very erratic behavior. I set up a test DB on each machine and set them to multiuser. None of the Macs see all three other hosts. They all either see only one, or none at all. One of them can see two. Two of the Macs are running 10.2.x and two are running 10.3.x.

I'm thinking that the problem may be because we are using a switch and not a router. It is like they are on a different subnet or something. Any advise is highly appreciated.

[stanley]

Mackev:

Welcome to the Forums.

Have a good look at your TCP/IP settings on the machines, and see if you've got any conflicts, or any other anomalous settings. The switch shouldn't cause a problem, but a way to check that is to go into the Network Utility and ping from each machine to each of the other machines, and see what kind of results you get.

-Stanley

[Steve T.]

Howdy, M! Other things you can check are consistency amongst each Mac's settings. I've seen show/no show kinda behaviour with AppleTalk being ON/OFF and set to EN or wireless. I've also seen issues w/Mac OS 9 but since you're all X, it should be good.

I never got the switch I was promised, so I can't verify that for you but I agree w/stanley that I don't think that would be an issue... but hopefully somone w/a swtich can confirm that.

--ST