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General discussion

Setting up wired small office network

Mar 5, 2005 2:34AM PST

Hello everyone,
I have two Dell computers, one running Windows XP Home and the other running XP Pro. They are both connected to a Linksys Cable/DSL Router to share the DSL connection, which is working fine.
I am trying to set up file and printer sharing. I have placed both computers in the same workgroup, but neither one is detecting the other simply through the router. Do I need to purchase a hub or a switch to connect the two PCs, and then connect the hub/switch to the router? Or can I simply reconfigure the router?

Discussion is locked

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The usual culprit is that firewall.
Mar 5, 2005 3:20AM PST

Did you allow such traffic on your firewall?

bob

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Firewalls
Mar 5, 2005 5:19AM PST

Which firewall are you talking about? The Windows XP firewall, the McAfee firewall on the new PC, the Norton firewall on the older PC, or the router firewall?
I tried running the Network Setup Wizard on the older computer with Windows XP Home, and it chokec when it tried to run the XP Version Checking Program. So now I am doing an upgrade of Windows XP Home edition, hoping that maybe the updates will solve the problem.
It seems to me that the only firewall I should run is the one on the router, not the ones on the PCs.

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Those are the usual.
Mar 5, 2005 5:22AM PST

All have to allow the networking to work. It can stress some to check each one to see if networking is allowed.

Bob

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Network up and running
Mar 6, 2005 3:19AM PST

Hi,
I succeeded at getting everything running, at the cost of having to upgrade Windows XP Home edition to Professional, and setting the McAfee firewall to zero protection. The Windows reinstall took me several hours yesterday--don't think this would have happened if both machines were running under Linux. The Windows error messages were especially cryptic--things like "Unable to run a DLL as an app". The whole thing was much more trouble than it should have been.

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(NT) (NT) Did you enabled file and printer sharing?
Mar 5, 2005 5:52PM PST