Lan Name Resolution Problem

I've changed ISP from Virgin Media to BT. Everything went well and the new setup is working well with one exception. There can be up to four computers on the LAN at any one time, plus phones and other wireless devices. For most devices I just leave addressing to DHCP but for the computers I need to use fixed IPs. However after setting fixed IPs for the computers on the BT hub two of them are now inaccessible from my laptop by name but are accessible by IP. All other computer to computer connections connect fine either by name or IP.

As this looks like a NetBios issue I have run Nirsoft's NetBScanner hoping to clean up NetBios but it hasn't helped other than to confirm that the laptop is the Master Browser. On the laptop I have also scanned the registry looking for any residual entries in the Virgin form of 192.168.0.xx (the BT hub uses 192.168.1.xx) but haven't found any incorrect IPs relating to the two inaccessible computers.

As everything is accessible by IP this isn't actually preventing me from doing what I need to do, it is just more of a nuisance having to use IPs rather than names all the time.

I've exhausted both my limited knowledge of networking and the time I want to spend fixing this and am hoping one of you might come up with a brainwave.

 

try ipconfig /flushdns in command

 

No change. My understanding has been that LAN name resolution is handled by NetBios rather than DNS - may be wrong.

 

Didn't finish my thought, got a call. Way back when I first got DSL they did that too - limited you to 4 IPs. I just got a router and put it behind the modem which generally gives you ~254 devices.

What OSes are you using? Tried nbtstat?

 

All on Win 10.2004

 

Diidn't see that. I'll take a look this evening. Thanks.

 

I wasn't familiar with nbtstat so I've had to spend a couple of hours studying the name tables for each computer but the tables are all consistent with each other - nothing to explain why just my laptop is unable to access the others. Any more ideas gratefully received.

 

On the laptop from an admin Comm prompt, what does nslookup (host machine name) yield about the 2 in question?
If your displayed an IP addy, name resolution should be good............ if not, its a DNS issue!

Can you connect to the 2 problem devices from a different client, other than the laptop?

 

Hi Rep, nslookup name comes back with IP and name

 

Can't do that right now but the two can connect to each other by name.

 

EDIT - just noticed that nslookup from the other two has bthub.home as the server but nslookup from the laptop has Unknown against Server.

 

I've taken this laptop off the network and reconnected a spare which, so far anyway, appears to have no issues. However if anyone believes they may have a solution then please post it and I will test it. Thanks for the interest!

 

All is good then.....does the spare run 10.2004 also?
Were these machines clean skinned or upgrades from 7?

 

Yep, all on 10.2004. Both laptops were originally on 7 and were upgraded when 10 was launched in 2015. This is the first time either has had a persistent networking problem though sometimes it can take a day or two for all connected PCs or the NAS to show in Explorer. I can only suspect this latest to have been caused somehow during the migration from Virgin to BT.