Unable to Map a Network Drive

[Guest]

I'm trying to map the memory card reader of an HP PSC2510 wireless printer as
a network drive. My wireless home network consist of an HP Pavilion desktop
running XP Home SP2, a Dell Inspiron notebook running XP Home SP2, and the
PSC2510. I am able to map the printer's card reader using the notebook but
not the desktop. Both the notebook and the PC have Norton Personal Firewall
enabled and Windows firewall disabled. The desktop also Spysweeper running.
When I try to map the memory card reader on the desktop, I receive the
following message: The network path \\192.168.0.3\Memory_Card could not be
found. Any suggestions?

 

[Hans-Georg Michna]

I'm trying to map the memory card reader of an HP PSC2510 wireless printer as
a network drive. My wireless home network consist of an HP Pavilion desktop
running XP Home SP2, a Dell Inspiron notebook running XP Home SP2, and the
PSC2510. I am able to map the printer's card reader using the notebook but
not the desktop. Both the notebook and the PC have Norton Personal Firewall
enabled and Windows firewall disabled. The desktop also Spysweeper running.
When I try to map the memory card reader on the desktop, I receive the
following message: The network path \\192.168.0.3\Memory_Card could not be
found. Any suggestions?

Larry,

can you ping that IP address?

Hans-Georg

 

[Guest]

Hans-Georg. Thanks for the reply. I think I solved the problem. The printer
receives a unique IP address when it powers up. As I mentioned, I have NPFW
on both PC's. It turns out the reason the notebook could map a drive
yesterday is that 1 ip address (192.168.0.3) was designated a trusted zone
computer in NPFW. It just happened that yesteday the printer was assigned
that ip address. Meanwhile the desktop did not have any trusted zone
computers. Now on both PC's (desktop and notebook) I specified a range of
trusted computers for NPFW (192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.4) and I'm hoping this
does the trick. Can you recommend a best-practice for NPFW to recognize the
PSC2510 on a consistent basis? To answer your question. I could ping the
printer from both the notebook and the desktop even before I set up the range
of trusted ip addresses. This makes sense because I could issue print, scan,
copy commands from both machines, I just couldn't map the card reader to a
drive. One more thing. I compared the network configuration of the 2 PC's
using the ipconfig /all command, they had the same subnet mask, the same
default gateway, and different ip addresses (I think this is as it should
be). The only difference was that the desktop had NetBIOS over TCP/IP
disabled and the notebood was set to default. I set the desktop to the
default setting also. I'm certainly not a networking expert. I don't know if
doing this was significant.

 

[Hans-Georg Michna]

Hans-Georg. Thanks for the reply. I think I solved the problem. The printer
receives a unique IP address when it powers up. As I mentioned, I have NPFW
on both PC's. It turns out the reason the notebook could map a drive
yesterday is that 1 ip address (192.168.0.3) was designated a trusted zone
computer in NPFW. It just happened that yesteday the printer was assigned
that ip address. Meanwhile the desktop did not have any trusted zone
computers. Now on both PC's (desktop and notebook) I specified a range of
trusted computers for NPFW (192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.4) and I'm hoping this
does the trick. Can you recommend a best-practice for NPFW to recognize the
PSC2510 on a consistent basis? To answer your question. I could ping the
printer from both the notebook and the desktop even before I set up the range
of trusted ip addresses. This makes sense because I could issue print, scan,
copy commands from both machines, I just couldn't map the card reader to a
drive.

Larry,

You can put the entire range of 192.168.0.1 through
192.168.0.254 into the trusted range. In fact, you could put all
IP addresses that begin with 192.168 in the trusted range,
because these are private network reserved addresses that are
not routed by any router out on the Internet.

You could also limit the DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration
Protocol) address range and give the printer a fixed IP address
outside the DHCP range, but I think this is not necessary in
your configuration.

One more thing. I compared the network configuration of the 2 PC's
using the ipconfig /all command, they had the same subnet mask, the same
default gateway, and different ip addresses (I think this is as it should
be). The only difference was that the desktop had NetBIOS over TCP/IP
disabled and the notebood was set to default. I set the desktop to the
default setting also. I'm certainly not a networking expert. I don't know if
doing this was significant.

I think it was. Well done. Without NetBIOS over TCP/IP Windows
networking will be severely limited or won't work at all.

Hans-Georg