Accessing Resources on a network

[+John Teacake MVC]

I am currently running Zone Alarm 4 and Norton Personal Firewall and i have a wirless network set up. Everytime i want to print something or access the shared drives etc through the network i have to disable the firewalls is there anyway of doing it so i dont have to disable the firewalls everytime. Also at the moment ive got XP home on my laptop and 2003 Server on my computer, 2003 can see my laptop but XP home cant see my computer. Any ideas ? . . . Thanks in advance.

[Eversurf]

Firewall question

You would need to open a specific port for traffic to the shared folder. I do not know which port you need to open. Also i think those firewall will let you put in a trusted IP address. If they do you can then put in the IP address of the machine that want to connect and it should let you go in.

XP home

If you did this properly you probably setup a domain on 2k3 server. Windows XP home "cannot join a domain". It might also be related to the fact that you have all those firewall on your machine. A first, basic and simple test, would be to try to ping the server from your laptop

[+John Teacake MVC]

yeah i can ping perfectly fine. thanks for the info though.

[Got3n]

Why o Why are you running 2 firewalls, zone alarm is fine on its own. Putting in a trusted Ip would be the best thing to do.

[+John Teacake MVC]

im paranoid about security lol. the flaws on one are the strengths in the others. its something ive always done.

[cpugeniusmv]

running two firewalls can actually cause conflicts, and possibly even lower your security...

it's best to only run one.

[Aaron P]

Two firewalls is a little over the top me thinks.

To access a file server you'll have to open these ports:

TCP 139

TCP 445

UDP 137

UDP 138

[+John Teacake MVC]

when i disable both firewalls then i still cant see the computers.

[PseudoRandomDragon]

If both computers cannot be accessed even with firewalls off, then the problem is not with the firewalls but in your setup. Verify the setup first, then configure the firewall.

When would someone need two firewalls and when would someone not need two firewalls?

Two hardware firewalls can be a useful thing to a network administrator. Setting up two firewalls that are configured the same has the benifit of adding security in this way: if someone were to get through the first hardware firewall, they would need to get through the second. Additionally ,the second one can be configured to trigger an alarm, alerting the admin that the first one was hax0red.

Software firewalls are a COMPLETELY different story. Two software firewalls can conflict as they do similar things and sometimes share libraries. If one were to fail, you would know anyway because it is right on your desktop.

2 hardware firewalls = good.

1 software and 1 hardware = good.

2 software = bad :crazy:

[+John Teacake MVC]

ok so we have worked out that 2 firewalls is a bad idea. Ive turned my firewalls off and checked my set up. Does anyone have any ideas that i could try to get my network working. Thanks in advance.

[Bruno Hawkaloogie]

same workgroup/domain?

"Netbios over TCP/IP" enabled?

Are you able to ping the other machines?

[AndyD]

It just sounds like you have to add your network range as Trusted. Pointless to have two firewalls running at the same time.

[xRKx]

And for a quick addendum, SMB actually uses ports 135-139, with both TCP And UDP connections. It can also use port 445 TCP/UDP.

[+John Teacake MVC]

same workgroup/domain?

"Netbios over TCP/IP" enabled?

Are you able to ping the other machines?

yes to all of them :)