Home Netork Problems With Norton Internet Security 2004

[Rodger Barnett]

I have two Pentium 4 Desktops set up on a Home Network. Both are running
Win XP Pro. The network is created wirelessly via a Linksys 802.11b
Broadband Router. I have Norton Internet Security (NIS) 2004 (on one
machine which is wire connected to the router) running with the DHCP IP
Address Range of the router in the Trusted Zone of the firewall. Everything
was working fine until a few days ago when the following problems occurred:
Network sharing of files and printers failed.
The error "Homenet is not accessible. You may not have permission to use
this network resource" appeared when attempting to view computers in the
workgroup.
The Network Setup Wizard failed to restore the network and would not even
show the main computer in Network Places.
Microsoft .Net Service failed using MSN Messenger

All of this seemed to resolve after I disabled the firewall, and ran the
Network Setup Wizard. The problems came back if I reinstated the firewall.

I tried checking the solution Turn On NetBIOS over TCP/IP (MS article
318030), but my situation did not meet the conditions that Microsoft detail,
and this lost the Internet Connection

I can only put this down to some update that Symantec have sent to NIS 2004.

Has anybody else had this or similar experiences?
Much is made of having a firewall in place, but it really does seem to cause
problems. Is a software firewall really necessary, or does the hardware
router provide a sufficient firewall? NIS does seem to detect a lot of
potential intrusions, but if it makes the network fail it is not much use!

Any comments - especially from the MVP's would be appreciated.

Rodger

 

[grahamilton]

Open the main norton internet security window

a.. In the main window, double-click Personal Firewall.
b.. In the Personal Firewall window, on the Networking tab, click Wizard.
c.. In the Workgroup Network Wizard opening window, click Next.
d.. In the resulting list, check the network adapters that you want to
configure automatically and add to your Trusted Zone.
e.. Click Next.
f.. Click Finish to close the wizard.

Or

select "Using a network address", NOT "Individually" or "Using a range"

add IP address and Subnet mask, the PCs will have to have manually assinged
IP's

 

[Guest]

Typically one cannot FIREWALL inside of a network

The firewall is the first line of defence from the internet, not inside the network

You have a Router and the PC attached to it. SO the firewall must be established at the router.

 

[John J.]

Rodger,
Yes, yes, yes! I just added three new Dell's to our
office network; they came with Norton Internet Security.
They set up fine and then one of the computers lost
network file sharing. I get the same error messages -
Office Net is not accesable.
I talked with Dell Service and they tried all kinds of
things for four hours and then finally had me RE-INSTALL
WINDOWS SP !!
File sharing worked until once again I installed Norton
Internet Security with their Firewall. The computers with
McAfee don't have this problem. The McAfee equipt
computers can see the one with Norton, but not vise versa.
Thanks for solving my mind bending problem

John in Mexico

 

[grahamilton]

EH!

Typically one cannot FIREWALL inside of a network.

The firewall is the first line of defence from the internet, not inside the network.

You have a Router and the PC attached to it. SO the firewall must be

established at the router.

 

[Rodger Barnett]

Thanks..that solution worked, and the network is back again. Strange though
that it worked with an address range before and then disappeared.

Rodger

 

[grahamilton]

Glad to be of assistance.

Sorry, should of added if your Broadband router already has built in
firewall you may be best getting rid of Norton (just make sure you still
have antivirus software), both do a good job as a firewall but Norton just
has added extras like Add-Blocking etc, and both do detect and block
intrusions, its just Norton has a popup window to tell you. Also Norton can
be a bit of a resource hog, plus with Google, MSN toolbars and with the new
features of IE6 in WinXP Service Pack 2 (not yet available) you can block
popups ,etc.