[curveman]

Hello All,
I have a small wireless (Linksys) system. Two computers running WIN XP (one pro the other home) and one running WIN 98 SE. My WIN 98 machine will not see any of the other systems in the workgroup. My XP Pro machine won't see the 98 machine, but I can map all the shared drives on the WIN 98 machine from the XP Pro.

Any suggestions ?
Thanks !

 

[Bob Cerelli]

The basics for troubleshooting 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

10. Apply the registry edit to fix the browsing delay from XP to Win9x computers
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/windowsxp_tips.htm#browsing_delay.

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 works fine so there is no need to change that either.

 

[curveman]

Thanks Bob for the reply. I tried going through your listed items. One thing I found, the default for my router and cards is to let the ip and dns address be found automatically, this allows the win 98 machine to see the internet and the router. However, when I put the ip address and correct subnet mask in manually, the network connection comes back up and I can see all the other computers (2) on the network and they can see the win 98 machine, but then I have no internet connection.

Any happy ground to find here ?

Thanks

 

[Bob Cerelli]

In addition to the IP address and subnet mask, you also need to use the correct DNS and Gateway IP addresses.

 

[curveman]

If I set the settings as you suggest on my 98 SE machine, does that mean I will need to define them for the other machines on the network ?

Thanks, Bob.

 

[coulterp]

If I set the settings as you suggest on my 98 SE machinene, does that mean I will need to define them for the other machines on the network ?

No, you can have a mixture of dynamic and static IP addrs on your LAN no prob. Just have a care in configuring the router and make sure that it does not try to issue dynamic IP addrs that may already be in use as static IP addrs (as on your 98SE box). Typically you'd set the router to issue a range (say x.x.x.2 -- x.x.x.100) and then set any static IP addrs outside that range.