Crossover Networking with Windblows XP Pro

Take it from a formerly long-haired, but now bald person, don't rip your hair out. But I digress.

When I reinstalled XP Pro my 8887 automatically configured a Network Bridge (Device name MAC Bridge Miniport) between the Realtek Ethernet and 1394 Net Adapter. I've had trouble both at home and at work mapping to other PCs and files on the network, or vice-versa. If I try to connect the networking goes off into never-never land and I frequently have to cancel the process via Task Manager. It's ugly.

What I've found that does work, is when you do a Map Network Drive and select "Connect using different user name", map as the ADMINISTRATOR for the PC to which you want to connect (or the 8887 administrator if you're going from another PC to your 8887). For example, you'd map as: PC_NAME\ADMIN_NAME, password ADMIN_PASSWORD.

I haven't had any problem with this method, though I have the good fortune to know the admin names and passwords of most of the PCs I need to get to. Also, at work, I've added my 8887 to the work domain, making things easier there, and not always requiring the admin name method. I found that at home the local DHCP was giving the PCs a domain name of MSHOME.NET, which I hadn't noticed before on the home LAN. Good luck!

don't forget the hidden administrative shares for ease of use and not having to set up any visable shares.

So you could also connect to \\comp2\c$ where you replace comp2 with your computer name. Using the same method as above for the username/password.

Every drive will have these "administrative" shares so you don't actually need to setup shares as long as you know the administrator information or part of the administrative group for that machine.

Citan,

I hope I'm not stating the obvious, but make sure that you have enabled Sharing, and are using the same WORKGROUP name for each machine.

hey tmapp..long time no see...

More like a couple of days really but hey!

gs,

I was MIA for a while, but will always be back Good to see that your PPS (Posts per second) is still strong. My best friend also has the initials GS and he loves fast cars. He owns a porche specialty shop and I call him GS. He races them too. Personally I would prefer a ferrari, but I actually drive over-lifted trucks. At least we have the ferrari of "portable desktops".

tmapp

Did you set up your IP address settings? I have a crossover setup in my dorm room, and we had to set up IP addresses to get our LAN up and running.

A very annoying feature of windows is that sometimes the computers can take up to 45 minutes to see each other due to them trying to figure out the "master browser". When those issues happen the computers won't be able to see each other if you go to the network neighborhood. Instead try going to the 'find computer' also accessed via ctrl+windowskey+f key combination and typing in the name of the other computer. This should allow you to find the other computer from whichever one you are searching.

Also ping to the other machine to establish that there is a valid connection between the two, nothing worse then having a bad crossover cable. Networking with just two computers has to be one of the toughest things to troubleshoot because you cannot be sure which one of them is misbehaving. Do you have access to a third computer and hub or a network to aid in the troubleshooting? I once spent well over 30 hrs with a friend trying to troubleshoot a bnc connection between our two computers. We took them into work and had the issue solved in 15 minutes when we connected to the network. His worked, mine didn't, trouble isolated.

I hope some of this helps and good luck.