Re: wireless networking and file sharing

Charlie3110 wrote:

I know that you must have answered this question a thousand times and i
apologise for that but as we two silver surfers are floundering around in
a plethora of answers and methods I am hoping that you can point me to a
link that will talk at me in basic terms. My friend and I want to share
files between his laptop and my desktop. He already uses my internet
connection wirelessly and without problem. what we need now is a basic
instruction as to how to set up a network connection to share files. We
have read all about mapping and have tried various wizards but every time
we look into My Network Places we don't have any network places! I am sure
that it is easy when you know how and we are probably getting nearly there
but we don't know when it goes wrong. We both can complete the Set Up a
Home or Small Office Wizard and we get to the bit where it says Finished
and we think we have finished but.......... it is just teasing us.

For XP, start by running the Network Setup Wizard on all machines (see
caveat in Item A below).

Problems sharing files between computers on a network are generally caused
by 1) a misconfigured firewall; or 2) inadvertently running two firewalls
such as the built-in Windows Firewall and a third-party firewall; and/or 3)
not having identical user accounts and passwords on all Workgroup machines;
4) trying to create shares where the operating system does not permit it.

For XP and Windows 2003 Server, MVP Hans-Georg Michna has an excellent small
network troubleshooter. It may also be useful with Vista.

http://winhlp.com/wxnet.htm

Here are some general networking tips for home/small networks:

A. Configure firewalls on all machines to allow the Local Area Network (LAN)
traffic as trusted. With Windows Firewall, this means allowing File/Printer
Sharing on the Exceptions tab. Normally running the Network Setup Wizard on
XP will take care of this for those machines.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 2006/07) which acts as a firewall, then you're
fine. With third-party firewalls, I usually configure the LAN allowance
with an IP range. Ex. would be 192.168.1.0-192.168.1.254. Obviously you
would substitute your correct subnet. Do not run more than one firewall.

B. For ease of organization, put all computers in the same Workgroup. This
is done from the System applet in Control Panel, Computer Name tab.

C. Create matching user accounts and passwords on all machines. You do not
need to be logged into the same account on all machines and the passwords
assigned to each user account can be different; the accounts/passwords just
need to exist and match on all machines. If you wish a machine to boot
directly to the Desktop (into one particular user's account) for
convenience, you can do this. The instructions at this link work for both
XP and Vista:

Configure Windows to Automatically Login (MVP Ramesh) -
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/Autologon.htm

D. If one or more of the computers is XP Pro or Media Center:

1. 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.

2. 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.

E. 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.

Malke
--
MS-MVP
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
Don't Panic!
.

Relevant Pages

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