Home networking odyssey: Microsoft workgroup voodoo

By Mike Azzara

Chapter 7

Sept. 2: E-mail to Strom: "HELP ME! I have spent a couple hours this morning trying to configure Tonia and Dad (the names of the Compaq and the laptop, respectively) in a Microsoft network. No matter what I do, they simply don't want to see each other. I'm hoping that one day this week you can walk me through this over the phone."

Sept. 3, a.m.: I began to zero in on some kind of firewall problem. I used Norton Internet Security 2007 on both computers, and each time I went through and completed the workgroup network setup wizard (and the computer restarted), I got a message from Norton saying, hey, we detected that your Windows XP firewall has turned on; do you want to use that or do you want to use Norton's? And I always I chose Norton's. So the workgroup network wizard was turning on the XP firewall, I guessed, to make some setting change that allowed sharing, and then Norton was shutting it down again. I also tried to make all the setting changes myself without using the wizard, but I guess I wasn’t really able to find all the right places to make settings. I looked into Norton but couldn’t find any settings that related to allowing sharing on the internal network. I got only a MAC address under trusted networks ("the network with the MAC address. ... blah blah"), and I didn't know what, if anything, to do with that information. Sigh.

Mike's Home Networking Odyssey

1: The original home network mess

2: The great modem swap

3: Of scrimping and crimping

4: The first cut is the deepest

5: Mike's first punch down

6: Wiring the family club

7: Microsoft workgroup voodoo

8: From the frying pan to the freezer

9: The power of perseverance

What Windows really needs is a mind-reader script that would instantly understand a user's true intent, and then configure the system to achieve that end.   

Sept. 3, p.m.: I didn't get back to my desk until about 5 p.m. But then after about 90 minutes of trial and error, it appeared I had successfully networked Tonia and Dad. What I learned, painfully and slowly, was there was a firewall problem. I couldn't create the new network settings while Norton was running; I had to first temporarily disable the firewall. (Open Norton Security Center, find the Firewall settings and click to shut it off. A dialog box will pop up to try to scare you out of it, and you can choose to shut it off for any multiple of five minutes). Then, with the firewall off, I had to go through the workgroup network setup wizard. I was able to connect and share drives, though I didn't try to share printers yet. Then the connection died when I turned the Norton firewalls back on.

I searched and found a firewall configuration option in Norton to "trust" a network, but when I clicked on the dialog box it asked me for the physical address of the computer I wanted to trust. So I Googled, "how do I find computer physical address," and the first site that came up gave me perfect instructions (start; run; cmd; ipconfig /all). So once I had both physical addresses, I set my laptop firewall to trust the Compaq's physical address and the Compaq firewall to trust the laptop. After that, both computers remained networked. One nuisance was that because the laptop had a login and password, the Compaq needed to go through the extra step of logging into the laptop when it first connected.

Then I tried to connect to each computer's printer. Long story short: Once logged in, the Compaq had no problem connecting to the HP printer (because it is USB'd to the laptop in addition to being WiFi'd), and I printed a few different test pages. (At multiple points in the process, I restarted both computers to make sure the connection would "stick"--and it wouldn't. But eventually I figured out all the details and made it stick). But the laptop insisted it couldn't get the proper driver files off the Compaq to use the Canon printer, causing me to download the latest driver from Canon's site. The driver came with so many instructions about not connecting this or that that I reached a certain point in the installation when I just said, "F it." If all went according to plan, the Canon would detach from the Compaq and go live upstairs on the kids' network (once that was established), and Tonia would print off the HP. But I knew Tonia, and she would never want to deal with the inevitable multiple steps and troubleshooting that would come when she used my printer. The solution? Connect the HP directly to the Compaq and let me deal with the printing headaches.

Another major  nuisance was that I couldn't get the home version of XP on the Compaq to show an address bar in a folder window the way my laptop does. Time and again I've faced the problem of searching and finding a method for doing a certain something that invariably doesn't relate to whatever version of XP I'm using. Well, this happened when I discovered that I could type "\\computer name" in a window and get a directory of all the shared folders and printers available on that remote machine. Well, at least I could do that from any folder on my laptop to access the Compaq--but not vice versa, due to the problem I mentioned. Then it struck me to try Internet Explorer (since visually the folder windows and the IE windows look so similar). That worked.