I am have some trouble with my small home network I'm hoping someone can help me with. I do have a basic understanding of home networking principles, but my knowledge isn't too deep. The network is slightly complicated physically. but its basically a standard home network with a mix of wired and wireless clients. My problem is with the settings on one of the computers running XP, I will call this machine the tower.

At some point I wanted to be able to share the contents of my dvd drive on the tower from the other networked computers. After doing some basic web search I determined that there wasn't an easy way to do this with windows, and I downloaded a program that allowed this to happen. At that point everything was working fine and I was indeed able to share data dvd's as well as the standard shared docs folder. I have since forgotten what program I used to set this up.

The problem now is that the other computers on the network don't see any of the shared locations I have set on the tower. However from the tower I CAN access the shared docs folders on OTHER computers on the network.

On the tower I do have a shared docs folder and it does appear to be set to be shared. The shared folder displays the icon indicating it is being shared on the network. I have tried several ways to find the towers shared folders on the other machines and I can never find it.

I'm pretty sure I just screwed up the settings on the tower. Whats the easiest way to fix this? Is there an easy way to simply reset to defaults all the network settings on this computer? I don't want to reinstall windows and I would rather not do a windows repair, as thats a pain cause it will surely screw up other things.

any suggestions appreciated!

On your XP computer disable Simple File Sharing, accept the security consequences, and then share out your drives.

Question number one: Did anything recently change (OS Update, Software upgrade, install, hardware change, etc). These changes can effect other things in your system.

Is this XP home or Pro? The permission are a little different on Pro than home. Also, do you have a mix of OS' on your machines?

Do you have all the PC connected P2P (peer to peer) or via a server (tower PC)?

Did the software you used to allow the removable media to be shared by creating a phantom drive on you HD? There are some apps out there that allow data CDs to be mounted as if they were a drive (H2O).

Did someone change the workgroup/Domain name on your tower by accident?

thank you both for your quick replies!
OK, I still haven't gotten it to work yet. Ill take the two messages above in order. I disabled the simple file sharing. I then looked at the share folder and it was still there and set to allow everyone all privlages. When i go to my laptop's network places, it doent list the tower. When i go to "view workgroup computers" it DOES list the shared folder for the laptop im looking at as well as the tower. However when i try to access the tower, it says something like the path cant be found and that it might be a permissions problem.

Both systems are running xp pro SP2. The computers are connected via a router. I have no idea what the program i used was to share a drive. I cant find it and i have no idea how it worked, but it did. Im the only one who changes things. I have not changed the workgroup/domain. and i can access the laptop FROM the tower. i can see that they are both set to the same workgroup. And sure im allways messing around with stuff and have changed a lot of stuff. Its been quite some time since ive had this working, like months.

i hope this additional info is helpfull.

thanks so much

to review i can access the laptop from the tower but i cant access the tower from the laptop.

Its a permissions issue at this point. XP has extra security built in.

Go to your shared folder, right click, select Sharing and Security.

On Sharing - Permissions - Make sure Everyone has full access.
Go to Security Tab, make sure Everyone has full access.

If you're using different user accounts per PC, you'll need to create the users with passwords on the Tower so they can validate. Hope that makes sense for you..

thanks again for the suggestions, no go.

first of all, when i checked the permissions for the share folder it already had all permissions aloud for "everyone". I didn't see an option for adding another user here, so i actually created another user on this computer with the same name as the user on the laptop and gave permissions to that user. nothing. i tried changing the name of the share, nothing.

i would like to try adding the share location to the laptop using the "Add network place" option, but i don't know the syntax. If my shared folder is c:sharedfolder for instance and the ip of the tower is 192.168.0.5 what would i type to add the network place to the laptop ?

im guessing its pretty much fubar. So ill ask again, if i cant get this to work, whats the easiest and least obtrusive method of reseting all networking settings to defaults? (yea, i know this doesn't exist cause its windows, but I can hope.)

thanks again !!!

Blueorange

It's hard to trouble shoot someones system without having access. So we're taking shots from the hip to help you resolve your issues.

I'm going to take a wild shot at another problem that sometimes shows up. I've found the built in firewall for XP will give me problems. Like when I'm trying to play a new game across the network. If I don't allow it it will not play. You may want to temporarily disable your firewalls and see if that fixes your problem.

If you can ping the tower from your laptop then there is not a connection problem.

I can't help but think it's a permissions problem as there are certain rules that affect remote (laptops) PCs that are associated with desktops. These are real headaches for admins when thy have a certain segment of their users that have laptops.

Let me know if any of this helps...:> )

>It's hard to trouble shoot someones system without having access. So >we're taking shots from the hip to help you resolve your issues.

yea i totally know it and i appreciate all the suggestions!
Real problem is I know just enough to really screw stuff up good !

OK, I'm gonna give it a rest for now and get back to it soon.

thanks again

FWIW, I have XP Pro and just use Simple File Sharing with no problem. If you don't use SFS, you have to set the Security on both the Share as well as the Folder. I'm always puzzled why most posters say disable SFS.

Grumpy

Grumpy

I agree with you. IF you have a small home business or network then I would use SFS as there are too many ways to get your permissions hosed with the security measures posed in XP Pro. Also, I see more and more security issues that are introduced because of Window's added firewall. It has it uses but I see so many folks having problems because they have a router with a firewall and were told that they need to buy a firewall device. Now they have 3 firewalls to admin as well as file security from the OS. While network security is a very serious thing I think we are oversold base on perceived fears.

Just my 2 cents ....

Maybe the computer name is to long, I know if its to long there are these problems. I think its 8 or more