suddenly file transfers fail; internet still works fine

[ejayo]

I've got a bunch of macs on a small network; three are desktops connected through a Belkin G router/wireless hug; three are laptops. running 10.4.11 on all machines I think.

A few months ago, copy files over the network started become flakey; it would abort when I tried to copy gigabytes of video files from machine to machine via wireless; it quickly got much worse. Now it is impossible to copy a single file.

I get the 'cannot complete your request because you do not have privileges for some of the items.' error message.

The problem now occurs even when connecting the laptops via ethernet. Now, if I copy a single file at a time, I can usually get it to transfer; if I copy more than one at a time, the first might get through, the the subsequent files abort.

I'm using DHCP. Everything seems to have a unique IP address. the machine that I 'm copying everything from has a manual IP address; using the 'manual IP address with DHCP' in the network pane.

Googling this problem isn't working--it's too general. I haven't had a problem I couldn't solve with these macs for several years now. I'm stumped.

I download most of my TV now with bittorrent and I use the network to copy the files into a hard disk based player (not apple TV, something else) which mounts as a USB hard disk. I've stopped even trying to copy to it; I now copy to the laptop, and then from there to the the external drive; this works most often.

I used to copy gigs of stuff over the airport, and it just worked. Now it doesn't. A friend thought it was an airport issue, but it isn't as the same problem now infests the ethernet only network.

The belkin's firmware is up to date. Internet on all machines remains reliable. Printing to a network printer also works.

[michaelsanford]

Whenever you see the word "permissions" in an error on an Apple computer, the first thing you should try is to Repair Permissions (using Apple's Disk Utility, in Applications > Utilities) on each computer on your network.

If you can connect (I presume using AFP) to the other computer, it's not an IP or wifi authentication problem.

Also, make sure that the target folders you are attempting to copy to actually DO have the permissions set that allow whatever user you are connecting as to write to them.

[ejayo]

This makes no sense at all, but by tinkering with IP addresses on all my machines I've fixed the problem. Which is absurd. How can it SOMETIMES connect, if that was the problem? Why the stupid error message? Anyway, it works.

I reset my DHCP pool to use higher numbers, wondering if I had new devices that were soaking up the low numbers somehow (we bought some handheld game consoles and a Wii recently)

[michaelsanford]

That does sound interesting! I wonder if it's not a problem with your router...

I've noticed that with my WRT54G v6 and dd-wrt my iBook doesn't always report its host name to the DHCP controller (and I somehow get 3 separate IP addresses for a single MAC address).

Since it's working now, try enabling logging on your router and monitor what happens between now and (if) the next time it stops working.

[ejayo]

Everything is still working fine. Resetting all the IP addresses fixed it. Weird.