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Corey's Network Corner Testing
Your Home Network
There's no
way you'll get Internet sharing if your home network isn't configured
properly. A good way of testing the network is to try to "ping"
each computer from another one. A "ping" in computer terms is a
little piece of information sent over a network that basically says
"Hello? Are you there?" If the target computer is there, it will
respond saying, "Yep, here I am". To ping a
computer, open up an MS-DOS prompt (in Windows 95/98/ME) or a Command
Prompt (in Windows 2000) and simply type, "ping (target computer's IP
address)". For example, if you wanted to ping your server computer
(192.168.0.1) from your first client computer (192.168.0.2), you would
open up an MS-DOS prompt (or Command Prompt) on the client computer and
type "ping 192.168.0.1" (without the quotes). If everything's
working, you should get something like this:
If your
network is not configured properly, the ping will go unanswered. An
example of an unsuccessful ping is this:
Another way
of testing your home network is to share a folder on one computer and try
to access it from another. An example of sharing folders: on the server,
choose a folder that you'd like to share with other users. On my computer
I simply have a folder "C:\Phil Share". Right-click on this
folder and choose "Sharing".
Click on
"Shared As" and select the options you want. I have
"C:\Phil Share" shared as "PHIL SHARE" with full
access and no password.
Now put
something in this folder. Now go to another computer and go into Network
Neighborhood. You should see the names of all the computers in your
network (if you don't, something is wrong - do all the computers have the
same Workgroup? If they do, you should see them there. Try pressing F5 to
refresh the view. If they still don't appear, and don't appear after 10 or
so seconds and a new Refresh, then your network is not configured
properly. Go over all the steps in my previous
article and see if you've made a simple mistake somewhere). Now you
should be able to double click on the computer with the shared directory,
open that directory and copy the file.
Cool eh?! If
this all worked, you're in business - it's time to set up your Internet
sharing. If it didn't work, you'll need to go over the steps above and
make sure you did everything right - it's very easy to make a simple
mistake, and such mistakes can easily prevent your network from
functioning. Please don't try to install any Internet connection sharing
or firewall software until you can at least ping every computer from the
others - keep it simple! By the way
you can easily share a printer using roughly the same technique - go into
the Printer Control Panel on the computer connected to the printer,
right-click on the printer name and choose "Sharing" and then
click on "Shared As:" and then "OK". Then go into the
Printer Control Panel on a client computer, double-click on "Add
Printer", click "Next", choose "Network Printer",
click "Browse" to find the printer etc - it's not very hard and
it's beyond the scope of this tutorial so I won't explain it all here. Happy Networking! Corey Seaton is a Systems Support Officer with Queensland Health. He also moderates an email group on Home Networking. Why don't you join and talk to others who are networking their home PCs? Networking Help |
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