Networking Windows 2000 & XP Home

Factual Questions
1

I’ve got a small home network. It’s a Linksys router/hub and my XP (Home edition) machine. I’ve been informed that my job is going away :frowning: and I need to transfer a bunch of files from my work laptop, which is Windows 2000, and my home machine.

I regularly tie my laptop into the network and VPN to my office so that’s no problem.

I have, however, created a directory on my XP machine and selected that I share it read/write. I’m trying to find this shared directory from my Win 2K machine but can’t seem to connect to it.

I’ve gone under “Network Places” -> “Entire Network” -> “Microsoft Windows Network” on my 2K machine and find only my corporate domain. I’ve tried connecting to “\Athlon” and “\HOME\Athlon” through the run box but haven’t succeeded with that, either.

An ideas?
-B

2

Can you ping the other machine? Have they ever connected to each other?

3

Check that the NetBIOS protocol is installed on both machines (my guess is that it will be missing from the XP Home machine)

Also, check that the TCP/IP protocol is installed and configured similarly on both machines - your work machine may be set up to grab and automatically-assigned IP address from your work’s server - typically, you want the machines to be set up with similar IP addresses, differing in the last group of digits only (and usually in the range 10.x.x.x or 192.x.x.x for internal IPs) and the subnet mask is set to 255.255.255.0 - and these should be the TCP/IP protocol settings related to the network card, not the TCP settings for any dialup adaptors or anything like that

Make a note of the existing settings before you alter anything!

4

Sounds like the laptop is a member of your work Domain while your home network is, most likely a member of a Workgroup.

Right-click My Computer, Properties, Network Identification, Properties and Confirm that both machines are a member of the same Workgroup.

5

You are most likely right, and it doesn’t matter one bit. Pulling the laptop out of the domain would be the worst possible thing to do.

Assuming you have admin rights on both units, create a share on one, on the other put this in the run box:

\computerIPaddress\sharename

and click OK. Copy to your heart’s content.

If you have admin rights on your laptop, a better way is to map to the root of the drive (\ipoflaptop\drive$) from the personal box, then you should be able to get to anyhing.

6

Grave → Just to ease my ignorance, what calamity would befall the PC is pulled out of the domain?

As with most everything in my life, I know just enough to be dangerous. My wife will certainly attest to this.
:smiley:

7

Several things will happen, but I’ll just cover the first two you will notice:

  1. You will no longer be able to access company resources that relay on your username / password for authentication (this is usually network drives, but can include web servers, in house apps, CRM, anything really) because
  2. you will no longer be able to log in. Domain accounts do not work on non-domain computers.
8

I did it with a combination of Mangetout’s and Grave’s advice.

I checked and the Microsoft Client protocol was turned off at the interface. I enabled it and tried to connect using the workgroup name. That didn’t work so I used the IP address of the PC and the sharename and connected just fine.

Files are flowing across the pretty blue cables right now.

-B