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A strange device on my Sidebar

Q

quadgirl

macrumors regular
Original poster
I've been scratching my head, googled endlessly, and still haven't found the answer to this OS 10.5 oddity.

In Leopard I noticed a rather suspicious looking device appear in my sidebar under 'shared'. Where you usually would see somebody's iMac, or somone's Power Mac, there's something called Mac0016003xxxxx etc (like a MAC address). I can't browse it or connect to it. Info shows it as a 'PC Server'

Am I just being paranoid? It's there, off and on (mostly on) every day. It's just disappeared now and it may be my imagination but my download and upload speed appears to be a little faster.

There's probably a simple answer, but I can't think what it is. Any ideas ?
 
I did install OS X on a powerbook last week. It wasn't installed over a network though. I don't have a windows box in the house either.
 
Any chance you have an open wireless network? Maybe someone close by has a windows PC and is using your network...
 
aross99 said:
Any chance you have an open wireless network? Maybe someone close by has a windows PC and is using your network...
Click to expand...

Yes, that's how it appears, but it's not open and Mac address filtering is on. Before 10.5.2, I was forced to used WEP 128 as Leopard was disconnecting all the time. Maybe, I could try WPA again.

The router is a Belkin N1 wireless, there are 3 macs and an iPhone.
 
Incidentally, only my Mac sees this device. My notebook and my partner's mac do not. Stranger by the minute.
 
Sometimes my Airport Extreme appears as a PC connection with a hexadecimal naming scheme similar to yours. Could be your belkin.
 
I have the same thing show up on my girlfriend's macbook but not on my MBP. After some investigation I found out that it was my MBP's mac address. When I went to System Preferences/Network/Airport-advanced and under the WINS tab I found under NetBIOS Name: MAC********** . However, I have not figured out how to get rid of it. I cannot remove it and I made sure I am not sharing to a windows machine using SMB or whatever. I'm sure you will find the same to be true for you.

Anyone know how to get rid of it?
 
What about another mac in the house that has PC file sharing turned on?

Are you running Parallels at the same time? Maybe it is from the virtual machine...
 
aross99 said:
What about another mac in the house that has PC file sharing turned on?

Are you running Parallels at the same time? Maybe it is from the virtual machine...
Click to expand...

Nope, we have no PCs and no PC sharing. I did, however, install VMware fusion demo at the weekend but then uninstalled it yesterday. Does it install a virtual PC server?
 
I have noticed this ever since I installed VMware on my Leopard iMac two months ago. The PC servers connecting have been UPYOURS (a PC trojan horse name) and Computer2007. It happens whether VMware is powered up or not.

If I turn off my airport connection, the server goes away, which makes me think it's outside my network coming in. I live out in the boonies where no one could be within my Extreme's sharing range. I have jiggered my firewalls and have PeerGuardian and Little Snitch running.

It does not show on my 10.4 iBook and rarely are the two running at the same time anyway.

I do frequently have Transmission 1.11 running. But shutting that (and Skype and all other "holes") doesn't seem to disconnect the server.

It's driving me crazy. Anyone find a solution yet? I am probably going to wipe VMware and reinstall to see if that solves the problem. *sigh* There goes 3 hours reinstalling fracking XP. All this so I can run Turbotax Business and Quickbooks...
 
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