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Allowing access to my own computers within my own network

Author
20 Jul 2006 3:47 PM
Trevor
Please help I have a PC and 2 wireless notebooks, the wireless note books
allow information transfer and access to each other, but my main PC with
printer attached will not allow me access, and says contact your network
administrator which is me. How do I get all 3 computers to talk to each other
and print?

Author
20 Jul 2006 4:00 PM
Malke
Trevor wrote:

> Please help I have a PC and 2 wireless notebooks, the wireless note books
> allow information transfer and access to each other, but my main PC with
> printer attached will not allow me access, and says contact your network
> administrator which is me. How do I get all 3 computers to talk to each
> other and print?

Since we don't have a lot of information about your computers (operating
system? Version if XP?), here is my standard "network problems" blurb. The
fact that some of the computers connect wirelessly is irrelevant.

This is most commonly caused by a misconfigured firewall. Run the Network
Setup Wizard on both computers, making sure to enable File & Printer
Sharing, and reboot. The only "gotcha" is that this will turn on the XPSP2
Windows Firewall. If you aren't running a third-party firewall or have an
antivirus with "Internet Worm Protection" (like Norton 2005/06) which acts
as a firewall, then you're fine. If you have third-party firewall software,
configure it to allow the Local Area Network traffic as trusted. I usually
do this with my firewalls with an IP range. Ex. would be
192.168.1.0-192.168.1.254. Obviously you would substitute your correct
subnet.

If one or more of the computers is XP Pro:

a. If you need Pro's ability to set fine-grained permissions, turn off
Simple File Sharing (Folder Options>View tab) and create identical user
accounts/passwords on all computers.

b. If you don't care about using Pro's advanced features, leave the Simple
File Sharing enabled.

Simple File Sharing means that Guest (network) is enabled. This means that
anyone without a user account on the target system can use its resources.
This is a security hole but only you can decide if it matters in your
situation.

Then create shares as desired. XP Home does not permit sharing of users'
home directories (My Documents) or Program Files, but you can share folders
inside those directories. A better choice is to simply use the Shared
Documents folder.

If that doesn't work for you, here is an excellent network troubleshooter by
MVP Hans-Georg Michna. Take the time to go through it and it will usually
pinpoint the problem area(s) - http://winhlp.com/wxnet.htm

Malke
--
MS-MVP Windows Shell/User
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic"
Author
20 Jul 2006 9:05 PM
Javi0084
I was working on a cousin's laptop a few nights ago and got the same problem,
his firewall was blocking me access to his machine.

-Javi
--
Microsoft is not the answer.
Microsoft is the question.
NO (or Linux) is the answer.