Topic: Networking via router

[The Kilted Taper]

Can anyone point me to a good "idiot's guide" for networking 2 - 3 computers together via a router. One computer being wireless, and the others wired. I've got computer names set, and workgroup name is the same, but I just can't get them to see eachother....

[chase]

personally, i never bothered with all that "home networking" business.  i just use run an FTP server on one computer then login to it with another to swap files.

[mmedley.]

Make sure that you have a Windows password set for the main machine you are trying to access.

from the command prompt type:

 \\computer name\c$  (c$ is the drive you wish to access, d$ for d drive, etc)

That should prompt you to login and enter a password and you should be kosher. Do this with each computer. If you want all machines to be able to talk in each direction, do this for each computer.

If none of this makes sense, MS should have a good tutorial on ther site. Good Luck!

[Nick in Edinboro]

You could probably just edit the LMHOST file on the machines as a down and dirty way of gaining resolution to their machine names.

What is LHOSTS?

An example of how to write an LMHOST file

[JeffK]

http://www.mytechsupport.ca/support/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=49

that's a pretty decent checklist.

[heath]

sorry to hijack, but I am wondering if it is easy to do this at home with a router if one of my computers is a mac and the other is a pc.  Never bothered to try (i just email or ftp files between computers) but if it's easy enough, I will do it.

[The Kilted Taper]

Curious why this was moved to "computer recording help" when it has nothing to do with recording. 

[mmedley.]

sorry to hijack, but I am wondering if it is easy to do this at home with a router if one of my computers is a mac and the other is a pc.  Never bothered to try (i just email or ftp files between computers) but if it's easy enough, I will do it.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=54704

Should get you started. Good Luck!

[nic]

sorry to hijack, but I am wondering if it is easy to do this at home with a router if one of my computers is a mac and the other is a pc.  Never bothered to try (i just email or ftp files between computers) but if it's easy enough, I will do it.

if the Mac is OSX, then it is actually easier to see/share with PCS than it is PC/PC...strange but its true

[The Kilted Taper]

So I am a step closer. On my laptop I can see the other 2 computers that are on the network. However, On the desktop, I can see nothing. I can transfer from the desktop to the lap top, but not back in the other direction. I haven't even bothered to check what's going on with the 3rd computer. Any thoughts?

[kindms]

Depends on the OS. If you can see 1 machine from the other then it would seem that you have the IP setup correct. I would just dbl check that all of the machines are a member of the Workgroup you are using.

Also you will want to create user accounts on each machine. For example if you login as Administrator you will want the administrative password to be the same on each machine unless when you try to connect to the other machines it will prompt you for a password.

Or if you use a different login name you will want to create that user account on each of the machines and set the privileges accordingly.

If you are having trouble with 1 machine and not others, does the machine u cannot see have a firewall running on it ?

[The Kilted Taper]

They are both running XP SP2. Firewalls are all turned off. I do not have to log on either computer.

[kindms]

Could be the issue. What are you logged in as admin or a different user ?

XP Pro or Home edition ?

[rocksuitcase]

we use MS windows networking at my job.  I have found what kindms says to be true: youhave to use the same user name and password for each machine in order to "see" the other machine(s).

For example, all of our machines have a user name of "taxprep" with the same password set up in users and groups.  this is the user group which shares data back and froth.

so what Mike is saying is that each of your 3 machines needs to have the same password set up for admistrator OR you should set up a new user on all 3 machines named the same on all 3.

[The Kilted Taper]

Home on both, sorry. The desktop just goes right to the desktop, no log in asked for. The laptop has 2 profiles, but no passwords are asked for.