[SpartanTom]

I've run into an interesting bug at work, and I'm hoping someone in these forums has seen something similar or has some suggestions for what could be the problem!

On Monday, due to some physical problems with our T1 line, our company was without an Internet connection. Oddly enough, while our internet connection was down, none of our PCs running Windows 2000 or XP could connect to our fileserver, an old PowerMac G4 running Mac OS X Server 10.3. I've eliminated the fileserver as the source of the problem because all of our Vista PCs and Macs could still connect to it fine during the outage. Does anyone have an idea of why our Win2k/XP machines couldn't connect to these servers? They also froze up if I tried to open My Network Places. Their LAN connection was fine and unaffected by the Internet outage, because I could still ping all of our servers and they were still hitting up the email server for new mail every couple minutes (of course, not getting anything new since the Internet connection was down.) The second Verizon had our T1 repaired and the internet came alive again, the Win2k and XP machines could get to their shared files again.

Later, I tried a minimal configuration where I took one of the problem machines and, using a 4-port switch, had it directly connected to the fileserver. Still couldn't connect. It only sees our fileserver if it has a live internet connection! I don't have much experience with Windows networking, so I'm hoping someone out there with more experience could just give me a general idea of things I could check, or any additional troubleshooting I could do that might narrow down the problem.

Thanks in advance!
Tom Morrisey