usb shared printer

hello,

On my local LAN I have an HP printer connected via USB to my iMac and shared with CUPS.

If I try to print with my windows xp laptop (wireless) everyting works fine, but
before I can do that, I need to make sure that the iMac is started before I start
my XP laptop. Otherwise for some reason the XP cannot find the iMac.

Now the iMac's name is 'MAC' (I think this is shared with netbios?). So if I ping
the mac, and it was started after the XP, I get a 169.254... address instead of 192.168...
On the other hand, if I ping and the MAC was started first, I do get a correct IP address.

First I thought it had something to do with DNS, so I did a ipconfig /dnsflush, but this had
no effect. Also I tried to reset the netbios cache with nbtstat -RR, also no result.
And with the command 'netsh int ip reset' I still get the 169 address.
I also thried with a restart of the netbios helper service, but this again had no effect.

Does anyone else have any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

hey IceCube,

just to clear things up... ur getting the 169.254.xxx.xxx adress on your XP Client, right?

how are both computers connected? LAN, WLAN ...Directly or are they connected via Switch / Router?

and could you please screenshot ur IP configuration on both machines?

Thanks.

-chrnxR

hey,

thx for the reply.

Everything is connected to my router.

My mac is connected with a cable and my xp is connected to the wireless network.

The ip configuration is the same on both machines, through DCHCP.