Networking XP and Mac OSX machines

Hello,

First, please accept my apology if this has been answered before or the answer is readily available. I’ve Googled and Googled, Asked Jeeves, wondered what’s it all About.comed, Yahooed 'till my fingers were sore, and Doped up the hamsters with a plethora of search attempts. If there’s an outside source for step-by-step instructions, feel free to <ulr=“www.theanswer.com”>You’re an idiot</url> me. But I haven’t found it yet. So…
I am trying to share files between Windows XP Home Edition SP2 machine and a Macintosh OSX machine. Both machines are wired to a D-Link DI-804HV router. The Wan port of the router is connected to a cable modem. Both machines can get to the Internet. There is a Linksys WPS-54GU2 print server connected to the router, with 2 printers attached (one parallel, one USB). Both machines can see the print server and can print to each printer. The XP box is running Zone Alarm and both machines are running Norton Anti-virus.

I thought the articles on Apple’s Networking Support Page would have helped, but after following them as best I could, (I’ve come to believe I’m something of an idiot. Take that, ego!) still nothing. The machines don’t even see each other, let alone share files. Should I just go back to that site and try for the tenth time, or is there some mysterious insight I’m missing?
Thanks ~

Rhythm

Try this guide, or even posting a new thread at this site. But try the guide before posting a thread or all the Mac nerds over there will just link you too this guide and complain.

There is a lot of good info and helpful people at macrumors.com, but there are also way too many Mac nerds who live to bash newbies and people that capitilize MAC.

I’m not a networking guru, but would this help?

You might also want to check if the two computers can “ping” each other, and you may want to temporarily disable the firewall(s) to see if that may be the problem – check the links on the left side of the afformentioned page.

      • I dunno nuts about Macs, but I had to do this recently with two WinXP machines–share files through a router. I had to
  1. turn off the cable modem (actually turn the power off, or disconnect the cable),
  2. disable NAT on the rounter,
  3. assign static IP’s to both PC’s and then assign different names/same workgroup. I still could not get them to connect. Neither would show up in the other’s network neighborhood.

    What eventually worked was that after looking through a bunch of pages online on how to do this, I found ONE page somewhere that said that [in the WinXP network connection properties] you needed net-BIOS and TCP/IP installed for this to work. I had uninstalled all the network protocols except TCP/IP as a security measure because I don’t use file/printer sharing so TCP/IP is all I need [for web surfing] anyway.

-I had no firewall software installed on one PC and didn’t want to bother with doing that, so I just turned off the cable modem to make sure the router wasn’t also connected to the net. And I had to un-do all this stuff when I was done, in the reverse order. It did work though, and it took a while to transfer ~80Gb of files but it was faster than burning CD’s would have been.
~

Start with them just connected to each other w/o anything in between.
Get that right then start adding hings back one by one…

Reducing the number of variables makes problem solving simpler.

This guide looks interesting, but it is for Jaguar (OS 10.2.x) and the most recent Mac OS is Panther (10.3.x), so things may be a bit different.

That being said, I am sure the concepts are the same.