Pilgrim1936 said:
I have a laptop with Windows XP Home, SP 3. Recently I bought an iMac.
The
Mac can see my PC, but the PC cannot see the Mac. I have pinged the Mac
from
the PC - no problems. Windows Firewall is switched on, and I am using AVG
Internet Suite. Can anyone please help me to get the network going
properly in both directions?
This is most probably a misconfigured firewall and/or lack of matching user
accounts/passwords. The AVG Internet Security program has its own firewall
component, so you should *not* have the Windows Firewall on also. You will
also need to correctly configure the AVG firewall to allow traffic over the
Local Area Network as trusted. Refer to AVG's Help or their tech support
forums for how to do this. See general information below.
A. Configure firewalls on all machines to allow the Local Area Network (LAN)
traffic as trusted. With Windows Firewall, this means allowing File/Printer
Sharing on the Exceptions tab. Normally running the Network Setup Wizard on
XP will take care of this for those machines.The only "gotcha" is that this
will turn on the XPSP2 Windows Firewall. If you aren't running a
third-party firewall or have an antivirus/security program with its own
firewall component, then you're fine. With third-party firewalls, I
usually configure the LAN allowance with an IP range. Ex. would be
192.168.1.0-192.168.1.254. Obviously you would substitute your correct
subnet. Refer to any third party security program's Help or user forums for
how to properly configure its firewall. Do not run more than one firewall.
DO NOT TURN OFF FIREWALLS; CONFIGURE THEM CORRECTLY.
B. Create matching user accounts and passwords on all machines. You do not
need to be logged into the same account on all machines and the passwords
assigned to each user account can be different; the accounts/passwords just
need to exist and match on all machines. DO NOT NEGLECT TO CREATE
PASSWORDS, EVEN IF ONLY SIMPLE ONES. If you wish a machine to boot directly
to the Desktop (into one particular user's account) for convenience, you
can do this. The instructions at this link work for both XP and Vista:
Configure Windows to Automatically Login (MVP Ramesh) -
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/Autologon.htm
C. Create shares as desired. XP Home does not permit sharing of users' home
directories or Program Files, but you can share folders inside those
directories. A better choice is to simply use the Shared Documents folder.
This assumes that you have correctly set up Windows Sharing in OS X. If you
have Leopard, make sure you are using the SMB protocol and not AFP.
Malke
