Setting up a home network...

[Vincentf]

Hi everybody,

Some of you will remember I start a thread about a month ago about the very same subject. I forgot to backup the conversation though and now I'm left clueless. So here I am again.

I just arrived to my appartment where me and my 2 roommates are. We each have a computer. We each connect to Internet with a single high-speed xDSL modem uplinked into a 4 ports hub. No problem there. I'll list my problems question from here :

1- Even though my computer have a nic and is connected to a hub in which every other computer of the appartment is connect, my comp does not ask me a login/pass to start the network. Basically it means that I have no places to go in "My Network Places" and each time I try to access the "Global Network" it tells me that I can't go there. What's up with that and how can I do to be able to surf the Global Network?

I thought I would list all the problems I have but let's start with the most important one!

 

[Poof]

I'll list my problems question from here :

Actually... let's backup for a moment here.

First - do ANY of you in your apartment have firewall software running? From what you described, all of you are connecting directly to the internet WITHOUT even some hardware or sofware router, so your machines appear to be hanging out there for any cracker to have at!

Second, what OS are you running and what "global network" are you trying to view? Your local ones (roomates?)? If so, you'd need to make sure that all of your machines are configured to be members of the same workgroup.

BEFORE you do ANYTHING else - PLEASE put a firewall between ALL of your machines (you and apartment mates) and the internet if you haven't done so on each machine (eg., Zonealarm). Please? It's all these friggin' people running winblows without a care in the world who are now being impacted. And it's not only Code Red and its variants (where you have all these 2K/NT folks with IIS that is not patched and that they probably don't even realize is installed), BUT you now have that new "ARPKILL" variant of Code Red, that is flooding the net with all these random ARP requests that bug 9x/ME out, causing them to add to the flood, and that fills up MY firewall/Apache logs. And I don't even have any winblows machines facing the net. :|