Home Network Issue

[Craig_Turner]

Firstly hi to everyone, looks like a good set of Boards to look through.


I was told to visit this site, to see if anyone could help me with my home network issue.




Ok here goes:

I have set up a Home Network for file and printer sharing using the following components:

1. BT Home Hub
2. Main Computer, is wired
3. Living Room and daughters computer are both wireless.

Software using = Network Magic. (However did try the standard windows network wizard previous)
All HAVE GOT internet access - no problems

Here is the problem:

I can access all shared drives from my main computer, in all other computers.

I can access the living room shared drives from my daughters computer, and vice versa.

I can not access any shared folder/drive on my main computer from any other computer on the network?


I have tried the following

Switching OFF all firewalls - not worked
Checking Computer names do not clash, and are less than 15 characters
Ensuring the exceptions on the firewall (when back on) where correct, ie file sharing, upnp etc etc
Ensuring the drives/folders are shared.

I have checked the services, but not 100% sure as to what should be on, but it all looks fine, Network DDE etc etc


My 3 other options I can think of now are:

1. Format my Main computer (Hope not)
2. Try the 2 wireless ones wired (not practical really)
3. Change to a Netgear DG834G Wireless router I have (not sure if that will help TBH)



So if you have any ideas to try anything before I go to these drastic measures they would be appreciated, as I have been stuck like this for 3 weeks or more now




Thanks for reading guys, cheers



Craig Turner
Network Mong (At the moment)

[peterb]

You didn't mention which operating system you are using.

Assuming it is XP, have you got the appropriate access controls set up on the vmain PC? (I assume you have tried connecting the PC's with a wired connection to rule out wireless network problems?)

(Welcome to Hexius btw)

[Craig_Turner]

Sorry forgot about that.....lol

XP Pro - SP2, fully up to date


wired connection is the same yes, does not work?

What do you mean exactly by appropriate access controls .......... I have set the drive and folders I want to share - to "shared" ??

[peterb]

I am not an XP xpert (I don't use it myself) but on its predecessor (windows 2000) you need to set the ownership on the folders you want to share to everyone. However I guess that you have done the sam thing on the main computer as you did on the laptops.

I doubt that is the router though as that appears to be passing data OK, especially if the main computer can see all other files. Have you got file and printer sharing enabled in networks configuration?

So I suspect it is a configuration setting on the main computer, but without direct XP knowledge - I don't think I can help you (is it XP home edition or professional?) but no doubt there wuill be someone here who can.

[Craig_Turner]

Thanks - I have checked everything and can only see it being something on the Main computer, I just dont know what?

[geezerone]

Has this ever worked?

I found THIS link and some points there mentioned. I take it all PCs have the same version of NM too?

Have you switched off the XP firewall and tried sharing using a Windows domain HOME and then map network drives to computer names \\HOME\main_pc\<folder> ?

[Craig_Turner]

Has this ever worked?

Answer = Sometimes, now and again (very rare) it will work once, and then when you try to access it again it wont allow you to - however this has only ever happened about 3 times in 2 months?

Hence I bought NM


Yeah I checked out the FAQ. and yes all NM versions are the same?

Will try mapping the drives, as I have not done that yet - however I would have thought NM would do this automatically ??

Will try it though

[errata]

Did you share the drives using the network wizard or do it manually yourself? I found the later more reliable but it still needed time and reboots to take effect. The order of starting up my PC seemed to affect things as well, eventual cure had me putting the main PC on a fixed static ipp address, adjusting the router accordingly and re running the networking wizard on every PC