OT - Win XP Networking

[Adrian Brentnall]

HI Folks Trying to get a new Winxp laptop to talk to my home network. The laptop can see the other machines, but the other machines can't see the laptop...

Any ideas please ? Thanks Adrian

[Allan Mac]

Turn off firewalls temporarily, see what happens.

[Robin]

Are the other machines Vista or W7? If so, been there, can't recall which t-shirt fixed it, but assuming its XP SP3 then it *might* be WindowsXP-KB922120-v6-x86-ENU.exe (NB you need v6, not the earlier LLTD fix which only works for SP2). See eg

[Brian Gaff]

Have you got it set for dynamic ips or are they fixed? Is the laptop the only one on wirelass?

What security settings are on the laptop for the network.

You can usually get a shared folder to work at the very least, but some like the whole machine to be like a drive on the others and this can get very complicated on security. Brian

[Adrian Brentnall]

Thanks - I'll try that & report back.

Odd thing is that there are three other winxp pcs on this network - and all but this one can 'see' the new laptop.... ..wonder if that's significant ?

[Adrian Brentnall]

All XP boxes - two wp-pro (this machine - which can't see the lappy, and the other is the lappy itself) - other two are bog-standard xp.

3 desktop pcs & the laptop - 2 of the 3 desktops can see the laptop, but this one can't...

Odd! I think the laptop is on SP2 at the moment - but it's updating itself as I type...

[Adrian Brentnall]

Not sure how I'd check that

Yes - but two of the other "xp home" desktops can see it - it's only this desktop which is XP Pro (same as the laptop) that can't see the laptop

Windows firewall is running.... don;t know that much about security - was there something specific you wanted me to check ?

Thanks.... As I said to Robin, the laptop is downloading updates at the moment & we'll see if that changes anything (he said, hopefully!)

Adrian

[John Rumm]

A bunch of things to check...

Make sure they are on the same subnet (if they are DHCPing their addresses from a router then they ought to be.

Check the firewall settings are correct for allowing file and printer sharing on a home network (or disable the firewalls for the mo)

Check you have the "File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks", and "Client for Microsoft Networks" enabled fro the network connection. (check in the network connections app in control panel).

Make sure all the machines are in the same workgroup. (although even if not, doing a search for one of the other machines by name should still find it even if in a different group)

If one connection is wireless, and the others wired. Make sure the router has not been set to isolate wireless clients from wired ones.

Once all that is done, check the connectivity starting at the lowest level and work up.

e.g. From the command prompt, can each machine ping each of the others by their IP address (use IPCONFIG to find out your own IP address of a machine).

If yes, can it do it by machine name?

[Camdor]

Make sure each machine has a username and password, and not just a username