Win 2000 Pro - Home network

Help.....going round in circles trying to network my old and new machines and share DSL. Both 2000 Pro.....anyone prepared to take a complete newbie by the hand and show him where he's going wrong?

 

cj811 - no problem.

I'm going to suggest an additional piece (or pieces) of hardware. There are other alternatives but I really don't like em. This is easy, solid, and gives some built-in protection from baddies on the internet.

1. Get a router/switch (router for short). LinkSys, DLink, and NetGear all make them as do others. They are similar so price is the main concern. Look for 4 ports (with one for your DSL modem) and you want one that will do DHCP & NAT. Should be in the $50-$75 range.

2. Get a 10/100Mbs Network card (NIC) for each PC. Get a network cable for each long enough to reach from router/switch to PC. Regular cable and not one wired "crossover ". Set the network cards to "automatically obtain an IP address ".

3. Plug one of the NICs into the router and set it up per the directions that came with the router.

a. If your ISP assigns IP addresses on the fly, the router will pick it up via the modem. If your ISP gives you a static IP address, set it into the router. And BTW - you will only need to have/rent one IP address for up to 253 PCs at your house to use the internet.

b. Enable DHCP on the router. This will allow it to assign IP information to your PC NICs. The default address pool should be fine.

c. Enable NAT on the router. This will allow it to move information from your PCs to the internet and most important, to send return information to the correct PC.

When you finish and have reset the In Accordance With the instructions and rebooted the PC, you should be able to get to the internet.

4. Plug the other PC into the switch.

5. Put both PCs into the same workgroup. I'd suggest a workgroup name other than the default of WORKGROUP. Any word of 8 characters or less will be fine.

6. Set up a user account on both PCs for the username/password from each PC. Exact match and case is important. If you want both PCs to have full access to the other, put both user accounts into the Administrator group. Otherwise, place them in a group according to how much access you want each to have on the PCs. Note on passwords - for safety, each should be 8 or more characters, should contain at least one number, should contain both upper and lower case letters. Something like mYpass3wOrd would be very hard for anyone to crack.

7. If you only want to share the whole PC, make sure each user is in the administrator group on both PCs and them map to \\PC1\C$ from PC2 and you will have the entire C drive. The $ (administrative) shares are set up automatically by 2K. Do the same for any other partitions you have.

If you want more limited access, share folders and map to them.

Note: if you want to use USB for any of this or to use ICS rather than a router/switch, you certainly can but it won't work as easily or as well. But post back and someone will probably give a how-to.

Note2: if your PC<>router distance is too great for physical wire or if you need a roving connection or just can't run the wire thru a wall or something, you can get wireless devices to do the same thing. More $$ but otherwise will work pretty much the same as above. Little slower maybe from PC to PC but will for sure work.

 

Network cards in both m/c's and working......connected together by rj45 cabling - was rather hoping this would be enough harware.