Finder always forgets how to connect to networked Macs

Captain Code

Captain Code

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This has been happening for a while and not just on one computer.
I have 4 Macs on a network and they will usually show up in the Network "folder", but a lot of times when I try to connect to it, the Finder will say "Connection failed. The computer may not exist or may not be operational at this time. Check the IP address and try again."

If I go to Connect to Server and put afp://IP address directly it connects fine. So it's the Finder not remembering how to connect or it's loosing the IP address for some reason.

Rebooting usually doesn't help anything.

Does anyone else have this problem? It's really quite annoying and I don't understand how it can be that hard to get the Networking working.

This has happened sinse 10.4.1 I think and now I'm on 10.4.3 and it still does it.

All computers are connected to the same switch.

It's interesting that I can always connect to my brother's G3, but I have problems connecting to my Dad's G5 a lot.

Sometimes this problem will just go away as well without me doing anything.
 
I used to have this happen occassionally.

I mounted the volumes and dragged into a folder I keep on the Dock. Right click that folder to the machine I want to mount works every time now.
 
Just out of curiosity -- what brand/kind of switch/router are you using?

We had severe problems with LinkSys-branded routers/switches at my old job -- switching to high-quality Ciscos fixed that straight away. Symptoms were failed connections, errors when copying decent-sized chunks of data and rare but random disconnects. From what I hear, LinkSys routers don't like AppleTalk packets too much and choke on them. I have no idea what relation AFP is to AppleTalk (same? different? unrelated?), so that may or may not be a problem.

Also, are these machines statically or dynamically getting an IP address?
 
It's a built in switch on my DSL modem/router(acts as both). Speedstream 6300.

It's a pretty crummy piece of hardware so I guess it's possible it's the cause.

They're all static IPs.
 
Just a thought but I have 2 G5's on a LAN with a couple of Windoze machines and a bunch of G4's/G3's running 9.2.2. In order for the OS X Tiger G5's to see the G4's/G3's, I had to flip the File Sharing control panel switch to "Enable file sharing clients to connect over TCP/IP". This changed the communication from AppleTalk to TCP, if I understand correctly and now all the machines can see each other.
 
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