Right off the bat, I should explain that I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. I’ve never used XP and don’t know the first thing about it, except that the color scheme would look great in a teenage girl’s room.
I’m upgrading my computers to WinXP Pro, but I won’t be ready to update my main computer until I go through and back a whole bunch of stuff up. So I’ve got a LAN now with some computers using Win98 and some using WinXP.
I’m trying to set my XP computers up to connect directly to the internet via my router, which required futzing around with some elliptical dialogue boxes. Stuff like “I want my computer to connect via a home hub gateway internet exchange and I have other computers in my network that will do the same thing”. Huh? What’s going on here? I’d like it to be a regular TCP/IP and IPX network with my router as the gateway, which was easy enough on Win98, but seems a bit murkier in WinXP. As a method of protecting users from themselves, I suppose.
So far, they seem to play games with each other well enough. But when it comes to file sharing, the Win98 computer can see the XP computer, but the reverse isn’t true: the WinXP computers can’t see the Win98 computer. Can anyone tell me how I can fix this?
It’s strange that XP is objecting about connecting via a router. I didn’t have any trouble myself, I’m not even sure if I had to specify anything. The only thing I can think of is connect via LAN or similar, hub gateway stuff doesn’t sound right. I think file sharing worked without trouble as well, the only thing I can think of right away is having the same user name on both computers. I remember something about XP recommending you to run some kind of software on all the 98’s to get it to work, but I didn’t have to do that myself. As always, minor differences in the setup can change things from ‘trivial’ to ‘impossible’, so I suppose I might just have been lucky.
We had this problem, too, and I finally ended up just upgrading to XP.
I think I’ve read since then, though, that you can go into the network properties on the XP computer and add in some of the protocols that 98 uses but XP doesn’t, by default, and that might help. (IPX particularly, I think.)
It takes an act of God to get Win98 and XP to co-exist peacefully on a network. Sometimes the Win98 machine will work, other times it won’t. It’s an insecure OS trying to connect to one that actually has security…
We had one machine here that, no matter what you do, could not see an XP or Windows 2000 server. Others connected fine. But occasionally it would disappear.
98 and Me suck for networking. Until you switch over all machines to XP, you’ll run into problems.
Here are a couple of ideas for sharing files not using integrated windows file sharing. There is obviously FTP, share out the entire drive to the FTP user you create and you can grab anything you want. The other one is UltraVNC (http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/) it is excellent free remote control software that has file sharing built in.
I don’t think he wants a whole new way to do file sharing. He ust wants it to work.
Actually, I don’t mind trying the FTP stuff. Of course, all this administrator stuff about permissions and whatnot is new to me. Ugh.
But I figure I need to learn about this at some point, just like I did with Win98 networking. Now I can troubleshoot Win98 with my eyes closed (caveat: as long as Supertanker is sitting at the computer and actually doing the troubleshooting). But with WinXP, I’m starting at square one again.
I have folders set up to be shared, but the WinXP machines just don’t see the Win98 shared folders. Sounds like I just need to switch everyone over the final Win98 machine.
Yeah, I have the same problem. The funny thing is the 98 machine dosen’t show up in My Network Places but if I click on View Workgroup Computers and give it a couple of minutes it will eventually show up? Not much help I know, but it works for me.
I eventually just installed WinXP on my second machine and everything has worked fine since. The only time i run into trouble anymore is when my friend brings his 98 machine over and plugs into the LAN.
Sometimes you can Search for a Computer and have it locate a computer that wouldn’t otherwise show up in the list of “Network Places.” Might try that, Tom. I wound up doing that a lot, it seems.
First, can you always ping one machine from the other? If yes, TCP/IP is working.
I’ve seen problems when trying to run IPX and TCP/IP and file sharing, so I just remove IPX. There’s no reason to have IPX really, unless you really want to fire up Doom1 or Heretic and go to town.
So get TCP/IP installed and working on all the machines, remove all other protocols, and then make sure everyone can ping everyone.
After that, you don’t have to go into the TCP/IP setup ever again. Make sure all the machines are in the same workgroup. Make sure that “File and Print Sharing” or Microsoft Network or whatever is turned on and set to share files and/or printers.
Then, to test, don’t look at Network Neighborhood – that lags. To test, from Start->Run, type in \COMPUTERNAME (where COMPUTERNAME is, duh, the name of the computer you want to access).
Network Neighborhood lags because of the way its setup – since the system is supposed to run without a master domain server, all the computers on the network get together and have elections every few minutes to determine who’s going be holding the master list of all the computers on the network. Because of this, it can take a few minutes after a reboot for everyone to agree who is on the network.
Doing a \COMPUTERNAME just has that PC say “HEY! Is there a COMPUTERNAME around here???”
Yeah, mostly everything Xpav said. I don’t think there is anything too difficult about getting XP and W98 to work. But it is a bit of a learning curve to go from W98 to XP, if it’s your first time working with XP.
Here is a tip: use the same user logon and password for the administrative account on all the computers that have XP. This just makes it a heck of a lot easier to manage multiple computers. Nothing’s worse than having to reinstall when you can’t remember the password. I’ve done it more times than I care to remember!
I’ve got a boot disk that will allow you to reset the Admin password for XP machines without knowing the real one should anybody come across the problem Tim mentioned in the future - just send me a PM and I’ll email it to you.
FYI: I had this happen just the other night with a WinMe system and XP. What worked for me was to uninstall File and Print Sharing and then immiediately reinstall it. You have to setup your shares all over again, but it did the trick for getting the computer to show up in Network places.
I researched this a bit because it’s a problem at our office, and what happens is that a Windows network that relies on file and print sharing isn’t a true client-server setup. There’s no master server to maintain the list of network resources. The network is now peer-2-peer, and if any one system is hosed up, you lose the ability to browse the network.
And there comes Windows 98 and Me, which have problems maintaining the network list and screw up the P2P setup. There’s a browser service that needs to be running on all XP machines, but I think 98 and Me either don’t have it or have problems keeping the list of resources. Once they’ve lost it, the whole network craps out.
Ah, but there is a solution. If the machines have the same workgroup, you can always access your “server” machine by typing its name into the address bar, as in, “\machinename.” Just create that shortcut and you’ll always be able to browse all of your network resources, even if you can’t do it through network neighborhood. (If you map network drives, they’ll also always be accessible.)
There is no solution, beyond upgrading the 98 or Me machines.
There are a few things you can do, but they’re not easy, and all involve having to have a machine somewhere that stays on all the time. For example, you can setup a Linux system running Samba, and tell it to always win the elections for the domain master.
Or just get a Win2k (or 2k3) server, set it up with DHCP and the dynamically updating DNS server, run it as a domain controller and be done with it. You just have to make sure the machine is always on and that your network doesn’t drop packets.
You’re 100% correct Steve – the entire Win9x peer to peer networking is just fundamentally unreliable.
Or you could just setup a WINS server. It’s a windows network, after all.
I worked at a place where they had logon scripts just attach network drives to explorer for everyone and that worked good. Not a lot of people know how to use UNC paths.
I agree with peer to peer not being good for business, but it’s got its uses. If it’s just a little Shoot Club network and you don’t want to purchase extra XP licenses, it’s not so bad. And look at all the file sharing networks that use it.
