I’m having problems getting two XP Home PC’s to share. Both are wirelessly connected to a router in infrastructure mode, and both appear in the workgroup to which they belong when browsing Network Places. Shared documents, folders, etc. aren’t appearing, and I don’t have permission to access them. What should I do?
For sharing to work, the usernames and passwords on both machines must be the same. Or at least, each machine must have a username and password the other recognizes.
If Bob logs onto a PC named PC1 with password “boy” and Gina logs onto a PC named PC2 with password “girl”, then each person will have full access to their machine and none on the other machine. PC1 doesn’t know who Gina is, doesn’t trust her & won’t share anything with her. Dito for PC2: it doesn’t know or trust Bob and so it won’t share.
If you go to PC2 and create a user “Bob” with password “boy”, then when Bob logs onto PC1, his Network Places will include some shared items on PC2, now that PC2 knows who Bob is.
Ditto for Gina. For her to see things on PC1, go to PC1 and create a user named Gina with password=“girl”.
Both user names and passwords must match exactly.
Or, if you want to make things simpler, simply use the same username and password for both users on both PCs, ie a user named “user” with password “password”.
The critical point is that each PC must be able to look up the user/password of whoever’s trying to contact it from the other PC. And it can only look those up inside itself, so the other user must be defined on the local PC.
Give that a shot & let us know how it goes.
It didn’t work. I tried turning the Guest accounts on for both, too, but still no luck.
LSLGuy’s advice may be true for the case of shares with passwords and user restrictions, but otherwise it’s not.
My smb network consists of a Linux box, a Win2k machine, an XP Home PC and a few Win9x computers just for fun, and I don’t have to set up users or passwords to be the same anywhere.
The Guest account should (IIRC) be enabled for this to work. If this is indeed XP Home, and you’ve right-clicked on a folder and set it to be shared, then I would look at firewall issues.
3rd party ones I’m not sure about, but if you have XP SP2, make sure that “File and Printer Sharing” is allowed through the built-in firewall.
Also note that certain directories (My Documents, system, program files) can’t be shared.
Does the other PC show up in “Network Places”? What is displayed if you select it? Try using the site search in the top right at microsoft.com. It can be surprisingly helpful.
Just out of curiosity, when you first started, did you have passwords set up at all? If not, then that can’t be your problem. What I mean is, if both computers never needed to be logged into, creating guest accounts won’t solve your problem. Nanoda is onto a good line of thinking with firewall problems. My firewall used to prohibit user connections (Zone Alarm Pro) untill I made the entire network it’s on a “trusted” network that I wanted to share files on. If you’re running ANY firewalls at all, try shutting them all off as a test. No use going through the nightmare of configuring a firewall if it’s not the problem.
Also (and please forgive me for typing this) both computers are turned on while you’re doing this right? I actually had a problem once where a family member was trying to share and couldn’t understand why they couldn’t do so with the other computer when it was off. I’m sure that’s not your problem, but I have to suggest it.
Sorry guys,
I missed a key fact in the OP and gave accurate, but inappropriate, advice. I agree with Nanoda andThe_Llama.
If the OP can see the other machines in Network Places, but not their folders, then the issue is sharing settings on the offering PC or firewall issues at either end or in the router/switch.
If he could see the folders, but clicking them gave an “access denied” mesage or a long apparent program hang that eventually came back access denied, well then what I said would be appropriate.
And activating the Guerst account should trump that issue.
Is the Windows firewall enabled?
When I set up my home peer-to-peer network using the Windows-provided networking option, it defaulted to enabling the firewall. This is intended to protect you from nasties, but only really works properly if your Internet comes in to one computer (the "master) and is then distributed to other computers on your home network. From your description, your PCs are all connected into a common router/hub, which is one of Microsoft’s “not recommended” configurations. This was true when I set up my network, but things may have changed with SP2 of WinXP.
In order to share files or peripherals (like printers), I had to disable Microsoft’s built-in firewall and go to a separate firewall package. With the MS firewall disabled, sharing drives/files/peripherals is not a problem.
Well, good news everybody!
Norton’s firewall was the culprit. I had previously asked the owner of that PC to temporarily turn off Norton Internet Security to see if that helped, but either that didn’t disable the firewall or it wasn’t actually turned off.
I guess the question now is, with the router as a firewall, do I need Norton’s firewall running?
Thanks for the help, everyone.
Yes, yes, and… um… oh yeah, YES! The router as a firewall is a great way to keep stuff OUT. The software firewall is a great way to keep stuff IN. Yes the router stops trojan scans from seeing a trojan you accidentally downloaded, but the sofware firewall asks permission to let out that nasty one you already accidentally installed. I just got hit with the Bionet Virus. the nastiest thing I’ve EVER come across. Essentially there’s no real cure for it. The only thing that kept me from constantly broadcasting my info the the hacker on the other end (before I found out about it) was my software firewall. So I’d have to heavily suggest you keep your software firewall, even though configuring them can be a major pain. In the end, it could be worth not having credit card info and passwords sent to someone.
Dang. I should have read this an hour ago. I just finished networking my wireless laptop to my line bound desktop through a router, and I ran into the exact same problem with Zonealarm.
Solution was to disable it on both machines. I know that I could configure Zonealarm to allow the two machines to talk, but it’s a temporary thing as I transfer files prior to installing linux on the desktop.
I’ve never used linux before so this should be fun, if I had some much trouble with networking two XP machines together. Thankfully if I hose the machine, no biggie, as it’s no longer my primary machine.
Off I go into the wild blue yonder!