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ijusth

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3408

January 6th, 2007 15:00

odd networking issue - home network problem

here is the scenario.  I have 4 computers. My son, my daughter and mine are hard wired through a router (cisco wrt54g) while my wife has a laptop (the Dell) off wireless (netgear) but also running through the router. We also have a printer off the usb on MY computer that I want to be seen by all computerson the network.  Note that this whole thing worked prior to my reinstalling xp on my personal computer after I had issues.  Here is the odd thing.  My kids can see my printer (in other words they can print) and my wife's laptop.  My wife can see the kids computer but not my machine.  I have both netbios and ipx/spx installed and I have run the network assist program on the laptop (BTW it is an Inspiron 2200).  Every machine can go out and 'see' the internet.  Now theoretically I know I can move the printer to one of my kids PCs and as an alternative I can look into installing a printer server (wireless only since my routers hard ports are full) but I know I am missing something obvious.  Can't figure out what.  Any help is most welcome - thanks.

jmwills

2 Intern

 • 

12K Posts

January 7th, 2007 05:00

More than likley it's a third party firewall.  But first, dump the IPX/SPX protocol and NetBeui, they are not needed.  make sure that when you reloaded the OS the Workgroup name is still the same.
 
Make sure the printer is "Actually Shared" and has a valid share name and then delete and reninstall the printer on the other three machines by doing this:
 
Add A Netwrok printer by going thru the wizard, do not browse for a printer but use the second option by connecting to the printer wiht this syntax:
 
 
Where, dadscomputer, is the NetBios name of your machine, and dadssharedprinter is the share name you gave the printer.
 
After sharing the printer on the computer it is connected to, perhaps this will help:
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/networ..._net_print.htm

--

Also, The basics for networking are:

1. Make sure you have the same IP scheme (e.g. 192.168.0.x).

2. Make sure you have the same Subnet Mask, Gateway, and DNS IP addresses.

3. Make sure you can ping the other computer's IP address. If this fails, just for testing, make sure you turn off XP's as well as any other firewall.

4. Make sure you can ping the other computers by name.

5. Make sure you have the same workgroup name (watch for trailing spaces)

6. For troubleshooting purposes, turn off XP's and completely uninstall any other firewall software. You can always add more complexity after you get it working.

7. With XP, make sure you have the same username and password as the person logging onto the other computers. The default setting for XP Pro is to require a password for network access.

8. More details about how to network XP can be found at:
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/networking/xp_network.htm

9. More details about how to troubleshoot TCP/IP networks can be found at:
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/networking/trouble.htm

There continues to be a lot of misinformation about needing NetBEUI or to changing the NetBIOS setting. You can ignore both. Installing NetBEUI to solve a networking problem will just mask a some underlying and potentially important misconfiguration with TCP/IP. The default NetBIOS setting usually works. If browsing is a problem, you might set it to Enabled. But do not Disable it.

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