Problems connecting to other Mac in the Finder

[carlos100]

About a week ago connectivity to shared Macs (Bonjour) in the Finder became slow or failed with server connection failure error messages. We all run Snow Leopard except two older machines which run Tiger. Of course the two Tiger machines shares are immediately connectable. Although they also cannot connect to any of the Macs running Snow Leopard.

I have tried the usual. Go-> Connect to server afp://hostname.local and Go-> Connect to server afp://host_ip_address.local. Same error message. Can ping hostname.local from Terminal screen. Have checked that the hostnames do match the ip addresses as we do have an issue here with name resolution on the corporate (windows 2003) network. They recently migrated the dns servers and created new .local networks. I have noted that that our hostanmes dns records are not correct (wrong ip addresses). This is because our Macs are not binded to the Ad domain and therefore cannot update their own dns records when they receive a new ip address from the dhcp server. See http://anothersysadmin.wordpress.com/2007/10/25/windows-2003-dhcpdns-server-and-non-windows-clients/ for solution.

However this should not affect Bonjour? My understanding was that Bonjour effectively established a local network on 169.254/16 and used broadcast discovery. Unless there has been a change between the way Tiger implemented Bonjour and Snow Leopard.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[-AJ-]

Do you have a new switch or router that supports IGMP snooping? If either/both do, turn it off. This drove me insane for a couple weeks until I worked this out.

 

[carlos100]

Problems connecting to other Mac in the Finder

Unfortunately we are in a corporate network. Since my last post I have added local to the search domains. So in Terminal I can ping the hostname without adding the .local suffix. I can also telnet into the host on port 548, again with no discernible delay. However when I try to connect from the finder or the server connect method there is either a connection failure message or after a long delay the shared drive shows. This is even the case when using the hosts ip address.
This is more and more looking like a look up failure or possibly some ports that Bonjour use have been blocked on a firewall. So the shares show in the Finder but establishing a connection is slow.
But thanks for the suggestion. I will try to persuade our IT team to divulge any information on any changes they may have introduced recently and ask them if they have turned on IGMP snooping. OUr IT team offer just windows support. So I am on my own to resolve this with the help of people like yourselves.