need help with networking through a router.

[Sniper82]

Ok I ran WinXP network wizard on 2 PC's and restarted(have 3 I wanna network). I do not see the other PC under my network places. Is it because the firewall on the router or because firewall is enabled on both XP systems aswell? One has SP2 and the other SP1. I wouldn't mind enabling printer sharing and/or file sharing but the file sharing isn't a must. I don't want them exposed easily to others online so the file sharing ain't as important.

I mainly want to enable them so I can shut them down through this network only not on the internet from another PC. What all do I need to do to enable this and still be safe?

 

[kamper]

What are the ips of the 3 machines? Is your router acting as a dhcp server? Are all 3 machines configured as dhcp clients ("obtain an ip address automatically")?

If they're all on the same side of the router then it's not because of the firewall on the router.

 

[Cheetah8799]

If you know the IP addresses of all three systems and they are all on the same side of the router (your private network), then you can attempt to ping or connect to them in other ways that are more reliable than network browsing.

1. Try to ping them. Click on Start - Run, then type "CMD", click OK. In the command box, type "ping ###.###.###.###". With the ### being the IP address of one of the other systems. Try this for all of them from each system to make sure it's all good.

2. Try to connect to shared drives. Click on Start - Run, type "\\compname", click OK. compname being the name of one of the other computers. If it can find it, you will see a window open. If not, you will get an error.


I'm not sure if Windows Firewall blocks ping attempts or file sharing attempts, but you may want to disable it until you get everything figured out for now. It's easy to enable/disable.

As for shutting down the other systems all from one computer, that's kinda tricky as far as I know. Maybe you have some other software or something, but I don't know of any built in methods to shutting down remote Windows computers from another one. Unless if you used Terminal Services, or Remote Desktop Admin, but that's getting pretty complicated. I'm not even sure if you can use those features in XP...