Windows 7 and Vista network map issue

fr33 · 13 Jul 2011

When my vista (32bit) computer is ON, and my windows 7 (32bit) computer is OFF, the network map feature works, and vice-versa. However, when they're both on, for some odd reason, they both fail to make the network map. I get the standard "An error happened during the mapping process", which doesn't help. Also, the following things are true:

No computers are restarting
The vista computer (a laptop) has very good signal strength, and the win7 computer is wired
The computers can see each other when going to the "Network" part in explorer, and they can access each other's shares

So what could be the cause of only the network map messing up?

brady · 13 Jul 2011

do they share the same name?

fr33 · 13 Jul 2011

no, they have completely different names

fr33 · 13 Jul 2011

I also made both computers re-map at the same time and one of them said that another user was currently mapping, which means that the comps are communicating to some extent...

fr33 · 13 Jul 2011

Apparently, MAC address filtering doesn't work with Microsoft's network mapping.
And yet... it worked between vista & a hotfixed xp sp3 machine.
Well, it looks like this issue is solved now.

Link to D-Link Forum thread I found:
anyone getting success with lltd turned on?

If your network uses MAC filtering, then LLTD will be incompatible with your network. I do not know what the error message would be, as I do not have a DNS-321.

From microsoft -- http://download.microsoft.com/downlo.../LLTD-spec.doc
Quote
The mapper uses generation numbers to generate fresh MAC addresses that are unknown to the switches in the network. This avoids the requirement of rebooting switches between mapping runs, so it is critical to choose an as-yet-unused generation number.

I checked my router's logs and sure enough, there are randomly generated MAC addresses being blocked every time network mapping happens.