Hi All,
I am a real newbie in setting up routers, this is my first router set up for a small business that I run myself. I have A Cisco 851 router, a printer and two PC's both running Windows XP SP2 (fully updated).
My WAN port on my router is contected to my broadband modem (my PC's share 1 internet connection). My printer and PC's are connected to the LAN ports on the router (all Ethernet). Everything is connected using Cat 5 patch cables. I can access the internet from either PC with no problems whatsoever, I can also print from either PC to the printer which is also connected to the router (and not directly to a PC). However, I can not get my PC's to recognise each other to perform file sharing.
I have a VLAN set up on the router (auto-configured by SDM). Windows firewall is turned off (but Norton is still enabled). I have TCP/IP installed on both machines, I have both machines in the same Workgroup with differenet "Machine Names" and "Descriptions". I have also set up a "network share" folder inside the regular windows share folder that you see when you click "my computer" ("shared documents" and "documents"), I have also tried sharing the whole C drive. In my network places I can see my "workgroup", but when I try to open it/connect no computer names are listed and I get an error message:
"Workgroup is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions. The list of servers for this workgroup is currently unavailable."
However I am presently running an administrator account on both machines to get them set up. Do I have to set permissions for something else? As far as I am aware I don't run a server either, so what "list of servers" should I have?
I can ping my router (which has an address I assigned to it) and get a positive response, and I can ping my printer and get a positive response, but if I try to ping either of the PC's I get a "request timed out" response. I can ping each machine locally (if that is the correct term) i.e ping 127.0.0.1, but if I try to ping the address the VLAN has assigned to the PC (or the other PC on my LAN) that is when I get a "request timed out message". I can actually ping my real IP address also (the address assigned to me by my ISP).
I am a real beginner in all this so I was wondering if anyone has some pointers here (would be much appreciated), is there something I am missing? All I want to do is be able to do is share files between two PC's on the same LAN, enabling them both to connect to the internet, but not allowing machines on the internet to "file share" with either of the PC's or have any other kind of access to the PC's on my LAN.
Additional Details.
Network Connections shows the address assigned by the router's VLAN, not my real IP address for each of my PC's. So for instance if I gave my router the address of 74.74.74.1, my PC's & printers IP's are 74.74.74.2,
74.74.74.3, & 74.74.74.4. The subnet mask is 255.255.255.0, and I use DHCP to get an IP address from my ISP, but usually 99.9% of the time my IP address appears to be the same. IPv6 is enabled.Additional Questions:
Does the IP address of my router have to be a special address assigned to me by my ISP or can I chose "any" address?
Should I have to perform additional configurations on the router to enable computers on the same LAN to use file sharing? If so what are they?
------- Thanks in advance CB.