I have a home network with Windows XP Home, and two Windows 98 SE systems. I can share disks between them fine. I have set them up with Netbeui protocol.

Problem is when I take my work Win2k Pro laptop and try to get on my home network to access shared disks. Sometimes it works flawlessly. (The Win2k system has a different domain name.) Other times I will get the message "\\computer is not accessible. There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request."

There does not seem to be any pattern to when this works or not. If it works, or not, it stays that way for the entire time the system is booted up. Lately, it has been more difficult to get "lucky" and get connected. (Recently I got a second laptop from work, and the problem persists with this one as well.) Any ideas?

The first thing I would do would be to uninstall and unbind the NetBEUI protcol bound to each and every device on all the machines, meaning any NIC/Modems too. You only need to run/bind the TCP/IP protocol for both your 9x and your XP boxes.

Now the issue could be your work notebook and work LAN configs, do they require NetBEUI as well as TCP/IP ?!?

If not then your notebook can also live without NetBEUI and get around with only TCP/IP.

I think that because NetBEUI is a broadcast type protocol you could be getting into a home lan broadcast storm situation and of course this will mean tons of dropped packet requests all around

1. I removed the NetBEUI protocol on all machines... same results.

2. It is difficult for me to change the settings of my work PC. What I did not make clear is that I have a home office. I use a Cisco VPN to connect to our main servers for MS Exchange, internal shared disks, and Intranet.

3. You are correct. I also had TCP/IP on my home network.

4. Whoa! I just figured out something. I can't believe that I never saw this before, but it appears not to be intermittent, but based on whether I am connected to the VPN.

Here's what I have experienced a couple times in my testing:
- If I try to reach the home network while NOT connected to the VPN, I can NOT connect.
- If I am connected to the VPN, and I try to connect to my home network, IT WORKS!
- After a successful connection to the VPN, even if I am disconnected, I can still get to the home network disks. (The Cisco VPN still needs to be active however. If I close the Cisco VPN software, I can not reach the disks.)

Bryses: your questions made me investigate this further. Thanks. At least I have a "recipe" that works.

If this tells you what is causing this, then great. It would be nice to have it work all the time, but I can live with this approach.

Thanks,

Rob

I know this is an old thread, but I recnelty had this problem trying to enable file-sharing on 3 xp machines. After trying everything I could possibly imagine (tcp/ip settings, WINS settings, rights, etc) I finally found out what the problem was. When trying to connect to a machine using one of its local accounts, the format <username>@<machinename> does not work and will give the "There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request" error. Simply changing the username format to <machinename>\<username> fixes the problem.

I figured I should clarify why this didn't work. Using username@domain defaults to Kerberos, and if you are not attempting to access a 2000/2003 domain, or Kerberos realm resource it won't work. Since you are using systems in workgroup mode, there is no need to use the username@domain format.