Home Network

[sparklelard]

Morning All,

Just connected my Desktop and Laptop together via a 100mb hub. Access to the internet is via the broadband connection on my laptop.

It was a doddle to set up with the network setup wizard on XP Home.

What I am looking for is some software I can use to see what is going on on the desktop from my laptop.

Any suggestions?

Sparklard

[ScotsPine]

i use

realvnc. does the job nicely although there are other variants around.

[fiddleabout]

Re: i use

The variant I use is ultravnc. If using across a slow (ie internet) connection it's best to use the realvnc client which is compatible with the ultravnc server.

I run one machine completely headless (no vdu k/b) - you'll need to visit the cmos settings to tell the bios to ignore the missing keyboard - I forget the exact terms used but it's pretty obvious.

You'll probably have problems with either through company firewalls though. If somebody can explain how to set up to get through them using something-or-other-tunnelling in terms an old fart mainframer can follow I'll be very gratefull. It's probably on the web I suppose but I couldn't remember the exact names so didn't find anything

[reynolds]

re

Can't you just open the vnc port on the firewall?

[fiddleabout]

Re: re

Opening ports on my own firewall and forwarding to the appropriate machine is no problem. For some strange reason the company network admins don't let me naff about with their proxy server/firewall/smut blocker though.

[sparklelard]

Re: re

Company firewalls aren't a problem as this is a home network with two machines only.

I do have another problem where I cannot see the share from the desktop PC on my laptop. I have shared the entire disk and before anyone flames me, my anti-virus and firewall software stops anyone accessing my shares from beyond my broadband gateway.

[fiddleabout]

Re: re

Can you see the machine in

My Network Places
Microsoft Windows Network
<your workgroup name>

?

Unfortunately there's a shedload of different reasons why not if you cant.

Check ...

IP assignments
Workgroup name

for starters though.

[sparklelard]

Re: re

I've not assigned any IP addresses, though I can see both PC's in the workgroup.

[fiddleabout]

Re: re

Well I think windows xp will act as a DHCP server but I always manually assigned them until I got an ADSL router - now I let that do it apart from one machine which I need to have fixed so I can forward ports to it.

It also will assing a "private address" if it doesn't see any DHCP server.

As you see them the workgroup must be correct - try manually assigning them to see if that fixes it - use 192.168.1.n with subnet mask 255.255.255.0

The other thing I've found is that when networking screws up for no apparent reason you can usually get it going by deleting the adaptor, letting windows find it again (or force the issue with the add new hardware wizard) and just using the home networking wizard. You may want to tweek some of the stuff it sets up for you though.

[Vetran]

Re: re

to check if its a Wins/DNS problem use the ip address in the UNC path

\\192.177.22.33\myshare

instead of

\\myserver\myshare

to find the ip address either use ipconfig on the relevant machine or as its a small network you could probably use one of the freeware IP scanners if you can't get to the far machine.

Agree with the Ultravnc it rocks. And Patrick Garnier's 'VNC neighbouhood' is also cool.