you said the firewall is disabled on xp home.
and you can't ping that machine from work.
can you ping the xp home machine from another computer at home?
When at work. Can you pingwww.google.com(you should be able to).
If you can then there's no bizarre thing happening of ping replies
being blocked.
Call home and make sure that the computer at home is running - screen
showing. When you try to ping it
It's possible that the windows computer at home is going into
"hibernation" or "stand by". These have ramifications - including
Blank screen, lower power consumption. AND the computer can't be
pinged.
Why you can't ping the work one from home.. Well, the ping would have
to go through the work router. It's possible that the work router is
blocking it.
Try pinging one work computer from another work computer. If you can,
then this suggests that the work router is blocking pings.
Consider whether the computer at work and at home is running Windows
xp sp2 or a windows xp before that. sp2 has "the windows firewall".
An icon in control panel. Pre sp2 has no such icon. But it has a
firewall. The firewall it has is called ICF. The ICF is accessed by
right click your LAN connection icon in control panel, and go to
propreties..advanced.. It can be disabled/enabled/configured. If one
work computer can't ping another, and it's pre sp2, then it could be
the ICF blocking it.
Hopefully that gives you some ideas of things to try, to "test" ! And
what the tests imply.
Do report back if you have a question or if you can add to the mass of
technical knowledge available in the usenet archives!
when you talk of pinging machines, I guess you mean pinging ips. If
you mean pinging 'computer name's, then try pinging ips.
where you can't ping work->home, it's possible that your home router
is blocking ping. You could check that if you have 2 computers at home
to plug into the home router. or into a hub/switch into the home
router.
Besides the ping problem though,
you could use software like VNC to access the screen of another
computer remotely.
In theory you could probably use "remote desktop" for that too. Most
people tend to use VNC though, maybe they fear that remote desktop is
not secure.
You'd want to set up your firewall. windows or router or both, to
restrict ips that can log onto the comp. VNC server lets you restrict
in the server software itself.
You set the firewall on the machine running the server. With VNC or
remote desktop , That's the target machine .
You will have to do some port forwarding too. If going through a NAT
router, as you prob are.
when you think it's set up. You should make sure that other comps
can't connect to your target comp. So from your target comp go to an
online port scanner , that's like another pc trying to connect.
Hopefully you'll be able to connect from home though. The only way to
find out is to try.
It is possible for ping to be blocked , but to still be able to
connected at the TCP level e.g. remote desktop, VNC.
I had a crappy linksys router, crappy firmware. It blocked pings, they
couldn't be enabled.
