The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Need network setup help

I'm setting up a home network and I'm about to rip out my hair. I admit, I love writing programs but I hate dealing with the machines they run on.

I've got a desktop PC and a laptop networked through a D-Link DI-514 wireless router (the desktop uses a cat5 connection, not a wireless one.) Both system are ruinning Win XP and I used the network setup wizard with no problems (at least I thought).

Both PC's have internet access. The desktop can "see": the laptop on the netwrok but not access it. The laptop can neither see nor access the desktop.

I added the IP's for both to my trusted zone in ZoneAlarm and each was able to ping the other.

One goal I have is to use the laptop to connect to the SQL Server and IIS running on the desktop. So, I've setup one printer (directly connected to the desktop though USB) and one folder on both the desktop and the laptop for sharing as a trial. Still no luck.

Also, although the desktop sees the laptop, if I click on it in Explorer, I get an error message stating that the desktop does not have permission to connect to the laptop. It said to see the admin, so I gave myself a good hard look it the mirror. That didn't help.

Any clue-ful people out got any ideas?

anon
Sunday, April 18, 2004

Check the connections to make sure you've disabled the Internet Connection Firewall.

Philo

Philo
Sunday, April 18, 2004

After checking that (thanks Philo!) be sure to check Zone Alarm. At this point you are basically using your DLink box as a stateful NAT/Firewall. So let it do its job by configuring it using the web interface provided. From there configure your Zone Alarm to basically do only Application Firewalling (control outgoing traffic based on application or library) and turn off all the incoming firewalls by creating one trusted network where both of your PCs can reside in (192.168.1.* is probably the net).

Li-fan Chen
Sunday, April 18, 2004

Cool. The XP internet connection firewall was enabled on the laptop.

[Ther ZoneAlarm advice was good too, but I had already done the tweaking on it.]

anon
Sunday, April 18, 2004

Zone Alarm can do nasty things; one pitfall is if you disable it from starting with Windows. It still seems to have something running in the background, which doesn;t run if you let it start and then turn it off.

Stephen Jones
Monday, April 19, 2004