OK, tech-savvy Dopers, help me out, if you could. I’ve been beating my brains out on this for over a week now, and I’m completely stumped.
I recently bought a second-hand Mac G4 (Digital Audio). Installed OS X (10.2.8), bought a crossover Ethernet cable (5e), and hooked it up to the back of my wife’s PC, running XP home.
No sharing occured on the first go, but I was able to ping each computer from the other - that was on the PC’s “Local Area Connection.” I did something, I’m not sure what – and since then the PC can see the Mac just fine, but I cannot ping the PC anymore. Also, the connection is now labled “Local Area Connection 2.”
The two machines share the same IP address except for a 1-digit difference in the last octet. They also share the same subnet mask. The Windows firewall is configured for exceptions to be made for local computers. I’m pretty sure that if there was a hardware problem, the Mac wouldn’t show up on the PC, right? But I can use that functionality – I can retrieve files from the Mac easily, and the Mac can see documents that I’ve remotely placed on it’s drive, no problem.
So why the blindness? Why no make-a the ping, eh? It’s driving me batty!
Turn the Windows firewall off altogether and see if it works. “Exception for local computers” or no, that ($#()@ thing causes no end of problems. Betcha your pings come back.
Every ethernet interface has a 32 bit ID called a MAC address (for Media Access Control I think, not that it matters) that is unique to that card. An IP address is assigned later if you’re using TCPIP et. al., but can be any of 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255 for any card.
There’s no ‘original’ IP address that would have been assigned to your card. For the purposes of home networking, most people use 192.168.0.x, as it’s reserved and isn’t going to collide with an existing address should your network be connected to the internet.
Make sure that your Mac isn’t configured to try to get to the internet, i.e., you don’t have DHCP enabled and that you don’t have any DNS servers statically put into the DNS fields in your Networking control panel. If you do, that may be causing the problem…
This bites me every time my cable connection goes down, because even when I use static IP addresses to ping or connect via ssh on the Mac, it seems like the Mac still wants to connect to a nameserver somewhere, and so then I lose all LAN connectivity. It sucks. My only solution so far has been to create a new, “non-internet” network setup for those times, leaving out the DNS servers and router address from my setup.
This seems like it may apply to you, because you’re trying to connect point-to-point so you have no internet connection on the Mac at that time anyway.
Playing with the PC’s internet settings last night, and from the Internet control panel, I noticed that if you want to set that machine as a gateway for other networked computers to reach the internet, it automatically configures it’s address as 192.168.0.1. Maybe I should let it do it, automatically, and then see if the Mac is happy.
Balthisar, I checked my settings – everything is manually configured; DHCP doesn’t touch the address at all. Anyway, my internet connection is (gasp!) dial-up, so that address is supplied by the server at the time of connection only.
A-HA! An update! TimeWinder, you were semi-right – it was an 3rd-party antivirus’s firewall that was excluding me! So now I can see the PC, the PC can see me, Og bless the Mac, and Og bless me.
Thanks, everyone, for your help, and I apologize for the bump.
