- Feb 14, 2004
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I am running a Linksys WRT54GS router with the free ZoneAlarm firewall on my PCs. I was doing some file sharing between my wife's Mac and my Windows laptop and ran into the problem that when ZoneAlarm was enabled, her computer could not access my file shares. I did some exploring and discovered that you simply need to add the client computer's IP address to the Trusted Zone on the Windows computer that is serving out the files.
If you're using a Linksys router, the IP addresses start out at 192.168.1.100 by default. ZoneAlarm allows you to specify a range of IPs, so if you have multiple computers on your network or if your computers get new IPs everytime they reboot, you won't have to configure access to them every single time you restart your computer. Here's the trick:
1. Open ZoneAlarm
2. Click on the Firewall section on the left side
3. In the lower-right corner, click on the Add button and select IP Range
4. Configure the following parameters:
6. Click the Apply button
7. Exit out of ZoneAlarm (don't shut it down though)
That's it. You've just added a range that allows up to 20 computers to share files with each other. If you have more than 20 computers, what are you doing using a Linksys router?
The Linksys router does have a nice firewall. You don't necessarily need a software-based firewall for each computer, but ZoneAlarm also gives you control over what incoming and outgoing programs access the Internet. This will let you prevent applications from "phoning home" to their parent servers, which is nice for preventing auto-updating applications like Adobe Acrobat from going online (you know, the kind that keeps doing it no matter how many times you uncheck the auto-update box). My Mac and PC are talking to each other very happily right now because of this simple setting
If you're using a Linksys router, the IP addresses start out at 192.168.1.100 by default. ZoneAlarm allows you to specify a range of IPs, so if you have multiple computers on your network or if your computers get new IPs everytime they reboot, you won't have to configure access to them every single time you restart your computer. Here's the trick:
1. Open ZoneAlarm
2. Click on the Firewall section on the left side
3. In the lower-right corner, click on the Add button and select IP Range
4. Configure the following parameters:
- Zone: Trusted
IP Address: 192.168.1.100
IP Address: 192.168.1.120
Description: Internal Network
6. Click the Apply button
7. Exit out of ZoneAlarm (don't shut it down though)
That's it. You've just added a range that allows up to 20 computers to share files with each other. If you have more than 20 computers, what are you doing using a Linksys router?
The Linksys router does have a nice firewall. You don't necessarily need a software-based firewall for each computer, but ZoneAlarm also gives you control over what incoming and outgoing programs access the Internet. This will let you prevent applications from "phoning home" to their parent servers, which is nice for preventing auto-updating applications like Adobe Acrobat from going online (you know, the kind that keeps doing it no matter how many times you uncheck the auto-update box). My Mac and PC are talking to each other very happily right now because of this simple setting 
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