Witness Only Seen By One Server

The problem: One server sees the witness, one does not. If the dbs are active on the one that doesn't see the witness and I shut that server down everything works as it should. However, if the dbs are active on the server that sees the witness and I shut that one down the mirror does not take over because it can't see the witness and form a quorum. It throws Event ID 1438 every 20 seconds complaing "The server instance Witness rejected configure request...The reason 1451, and state3, can be used for diagnotics by Microsoft...."

The scenario: I finished setting up a mirror in a WORKGROUP, by going through the GUI and then at the choosing not to start the mirror. That allowed me to modify the NETBIOS names and change them to IP addresses in order to get around the FQDN requirement that I can't fulfill since the servers are in a workgroup. They are in the same subnet and can run SQL queries against each other.

When I query sys.database_mirroring from the database servers I get this on the good server:
mirroring_witness_name mirroring_witness_state_desc
----------------------------------------------------------
TCP://155.17.92.63:5022 CONNECTED
TCP://155.17.92.63:5022 CONNECTED

And this on the bad server:
mirroring_witness_name mirroring_witness_state_desc
-----------------------------------------------------
TCP://155.17.92.63:5022 DISCONNECTED
TCP://155.17.92.63:5022 DISCONNECTED

here's are the results from sys.database_mirroring_witnesses
database_name principal_server_name mirror_server_name safety_level safety_level_desc
-------------- -------------------------- ------------------------- ------------ ------------------
dbadmin TCP://pscdaltpscom20:5022 TCP://155.17.92.65:5022 2 FULL
dbtest TCP://pscdaltpscom20:5022 TCP://155.17.92.65:5022 2 FULL

Oddly, the server that I created the mirror from registered itself with it's NETBIOS name even though I told it to use an IP address. However, that's the one that is working properly. I think this might be a red herring.



Does anyone have any ideas why my second server can't communicate with the mirror? Any clarifications I can make? I have been completely unable to find a step-by-step guide to creating mirror databases outside of a domain...so if someone knows of one please point me that direction.