I have been networking 2 systems for months now with no issues but suddenly it doesn't work. its a mac mini and a G4 500 tower networked over a d-link standard 4 port broadband router.

nothing is wrong with any of the cables or any of the hardware. file sharing is turned on with both systems. I can access the mini from the tower but not the other way around. this seems so odd and I can't figure out the issue. when I click on the network icon it does nothing. shows nothing at all.. not even itself.

I am a tech savvy guy yet I am totally stumped here. any ideas are welcome.

thanks in advance.

You might try renewing your DHCP
Or just re-boot your router if you havn't done this in a while, they seem to get "Bit rot" after a wile :P

I used to have this problem networking an OS9 box to an OSX box, but never X to X so to speak, is appltalk active on ethernet for both?

Can you use the Go command to connect instead of the network browser?
Open a terminal and ping the PowerMac (just type "ping 192.168.0.1" Insert the Towers IP as appropriate. Ctrl-C will stop the ping.

I got sick of trying things and failing so I just reinstalled Tiger and all is well. I don't use a crapload of apps anyway so setup is short.

odd problem. maybe its a tiger/panther networking issue. maybe I should take panther off the tower and install tiger. same versions tend to network better.

update:

now I am having the same problem again. after a reinstall it was fine again as I said in my last post. now its the same issue. I cannot even open the network folder. I double click it and nothing happens. I am ready to pull some hair out.

its very important to me to be able to connect the mini to the towers drive as I watch video over the network often. I also transfer a lot of files from the mini to the tower. I don't want to always have to do all the file sharing from the tower. I want to be able to access everything from the mini as its my main system. right now I can only access the mini from the tower.

please help.

Enable AppleTalk and make sure Samba is setup correctly. Try manauly configing the SMB.CONF file.

Reset TCP/IP on both machines by going into the System Preferences and then switching to another network adaptor and closing the System Preferences. Open them again, switch back to Ethernet, and see if that improves anything.

Try changing the static IP's you set up for sharing.

You may need to disable/enable sharing in order as well. Just one at a time and do testing from there.

Other than that, can the mini see the tower? As in pinging? Other than that, make sure your router settings have not discombobulated.