XP PRO Client and ME ICS

I'll be connecting a laptop with XP PRO to my home LAN via CAT5 to share the dial-up ICS. The PC connected to the modem with ICS loaded is running Windows ME.

Is there anything I need to do besides disabling ICF on the XP laptop? Do I need to install the IPX/SPX protocol on the XP machine if it’s running on my two Win ME machines? Will the XP PRO wizard take care of this or should I do it manually?

 

George S - as to the IPX/SPX question, the andwer is "it depends ".

If you want your systems to talk to each other, they have to have some common language (network protocol).

They obviously all speak TCP/IP since they can get around on the internet and that is the only language in common use out there.

Many folks have decided that trying to use TCP/IP internally is too complicated and too prone to cause problems with internet communications.

A very common work-around for this is to install NetBeui and use that for internal traffic since it pretty much configures everything for you.

Others use the included Microsoft version of IPX/SPX for basically the same reason. Less automatic but a few more features and generally more robust.

In short, if your LAN PCs communicate with each other via TCP/IP, you don't need any other network protocol loaded. And shouldn't really have any others else loaded.

If they aren't using TCP/IP internally, then the XP PC will need to have whatever they are using.

Whew!!! Long answer to a short question.

 

Well, I plugged my laptop running XP Pro into the switch, ran network wizard, I'm now able to connect to the internet though ICS. The problem. I can only see one of the two win Me desktops in My Network Places. The one I can't see is the desktop acting as the ISC server, so I'm not able to share it's printer or files, the strange part is I can see the XP notebook on the ICS server. Any Ideas as to what I did or didn't do?

 

Can you "blind" map to the ICS PC from your XP system. In other words, if the ICS server is named ICS-SERVER and it has the C drive shared, can you map from the XP laptop to \\ICS-SERVER\C ?

Same idea for the printer. Can you add to the XP system a shared network printer \\ICS-SERVER\my-printer ?

If so, I wouldn't worry about the network neighborhood thing.

 

Thanks Newt,

I was able to share my printer on the machine I couldn't see, now and low and behold those shares all of a sudden appeared in Network places!! I’m miffed again. So all is well.