Basic network setup issues

N

Nugget

Weaksauce
Joined
Apr 27, 2005
Messages
107
I've got a water-cooled rig, I've got the appropriate ports forwarded for various apps...but for the life of me I can't set up a basic wired/wireless network.

I've got a Buffalo WHR-54G-HP connected to a DSL modem; a WinXP Home desktop wired into the router; and a WinXP Home laptop connected wirelessly. Internet connections work fine. What I'd like to do is share files between the two systems, and print wirelessly from the laptop (printers are currently connected to desktop).

I've fooled around with the network configuration tools in WinXP for a while now, and before I get to the keyboard-through-the-monitor frustration stage, I thought I'd ask for some basic pointers.

So -- how am I stupid?
 
A bit more detail, if it helps:

Under My Network Places\Microsoft Windows Network\[network name], I can see the names I assigned to both computers, so there's at least some recognition of the workgroup. Opening the local machine (on either system) works fine, but trying to open the other system leads to a lengthy pause and then this dialog: "\\[computer name] is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions. The network path was not found."

I can ping the desktop from the laptop, but not vice versa.

The recommendation in this thread looked promising, but the poster must've been using XP Pro; Home doesn't seem to include "Local Security Options" under Administrative Tools.

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Additional details:

Zonealarm Pro on both systems.

ATT's DNS servers are godawful, so I've manually assigned OpenDNS's IPs (in the router and both systems).

Both systems are running fairly old XP installs, and have had their network settings changed multiple times.
 
You will want to setup printer and file sharing on the machines that have printers attached.
To share files, just make a new folder and go to "sharing" tab. Then you get share the folder on your home network.

Make sure that all of the machines that will be accessing the shared stuff are on the same workgroup. The default I believe is MSHOME.
 
Thanks for the input. I tried that, but no luck. The problem seems to be that I can't access network computers at all.

I keep telling myself this should be easy.
 
Disable any firewall you may have especially windows firewall. Also check the ip addresses and subnet masks on the wired and wireless comps. They may be on different subnets. To make it easy make sure they're on the same subnet.
 
Annoyingly, that works. There's still a weird delay when navigating shared folders -- the window hangs for 5-15 seconds -- but at least things are accessible.

Thanks a bunch. So at this point I just add the DHCP server and machine IPs to Zonealarm's trusted zone?
 
right click on the printer u want to share, go to sharing, share it out
same with folders on both side

at each computer go to start run \\computername

if you can browse mount the drives and good

make sure firewalls are open for it, dunno why people run software firewalls on machines behind home router.
 
they are gonna hang depending on size of folder, you are browsing wireless which slows it down too
 
Thanks for the advice, all.

Gotten everything working. Here's a rundown in case anybody else has the same problem:

From one side, the problem was a firewall issue. From the other, somehow my network guest permissions were changed. In XP Home, there's no option to fix this directly, so you have to install the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools and do it manually. Details here.
 
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