Hello all,

I'm a new cruncher at WCG, I've worked on another project for a while but decided to move on. I have a "networking" question I guess, and hope somebody could give me an answer on the following items. First, general background info:

All my machines are on XP, mostly Pro but some on Home edition. I have an area where I can set up some machines and just let them run. I will not be using them for anything really. I would rather not have them connected to a monitor and peripherals, and essentially control them from one of the computers on my home network. The machines will be wired and wireless through a Linksys router with DHCP running and connecting via Comcast Cable internet.

All the computers are on the same workgroup, and file/print sharing works fine. Remote desktop (and assistance) is enabled on all the machines, and all firewalls are configured to give an exception to RDP.

My question: When I use my main computer (from which I'll be controlling and monitoring the other computers) to connect to the crunchers, I have to use the IP address of the machines to connect. They all have meaningful computer names, but when I enter just the name of the computer, it ONLY connects once or twice. After that, the remote desktop screen to login does not even show up, and the process errors. If I use the IP addy of the machine itself, it'll connect everytime. That works fine and dandy for now, but as computers turn on and off or get disconnected, they may be issued different IPs from my Linksys router.

Does anybody have an idea why I cannot get it to work? It is strange that it works the first time I connect and afterwards, it only works with the IP. I also cannot go to "<browse for more>" and click through the network to find workstations, but I believe this is not supported on XP, only on Server editions of Windows. At my work, I remote desktop into all of our servers running Windows Server 2003. I just enter the name of the server, and it works fine with the server. All those servers at work have static IPs from a Cisco router. I tried configuring my home computers to have a static IP from the network connections of the computers themselves, but once it gets the IP, it'll show it's connected... And it does not actually get onto the 'net. So I reverted back to the network properties and set it to obtain IP addresses automatically.

I could get by with using RDP via the IP addresses, but I would like to assign static IPs. Is there something I have to do on the router to make this work? I'm in the IT field but I just maintain the servers and workstations at work. Things were all setup for me when I joined the company. ;) It would be extremely nice if I could just use the computer's name and not have to deal with IP addresses. Is this something I have to do with the HOSTS file on each cruncher maybe? All this IT stuff is still new to me as I did not study this, I just stumbled into the job.

Finally, I realized that with XP machines, if I log into a computer through RDP from my main machine... the machine I just logged into gets logged out. WCG's UD agent still runs after I disconnect though. However, I have 1 specific computer that is connected to a projector which I watch DVDs and play some games on. It would be nice if I could have it logged in ALL the time, even if I RDP into it. At my work, when I RDP into the servers, they do NOT get logged out. I'm guessing this is a function of the Windows Server operating systems. Is it possible to do this with XP?

I hope some of you MCSE guys can help me out! I'm still a newbie to this sort of networking stuff, and I would greatly appreciate any suggestions. If I have to use IPs and the computers will always log out if I remote in, then so be it. It would be nice to know if that is definite though, rather than just thinking I screwed up somewhere.

TIA for your responses!