Home Networking Challenge
Patrick Knight
and Netgear trying to solve this problem. Perhaps someone out there can
suggest some actions to take.
The Situation:
I have (or aspire to have) a two-computer home network. One computer is
a 1-GHz Pentium III Dell Dimension 4100 running Windows Me. It has a
Netgear FA310TX Fast Ethernet PCI Card, attached to a cable modem. This
card and the modem work great. I have wonderful internet access on this
computer. We will call this the host or gateway computer.
The second computer is an 166-MHz Pentium Acer running Windows Me. We
will call this the client computer.
Both computers have Netgear PA301 Phoneline 10X adapter cards. These
cards connect through the home phone wiring to form the network. (Some
of the techs at Microsoft seemed to be totally unaware of phoneline
networks, and did not, for example, know that there was no hub or router
in such a network.)
By all indications, the PA301s are working fine. They come with
diagnostic software that indicates proper operation. I can ping each
computer from the other. When I run "net diag" with either computer as
the diagnostic host, it reports that things are working fine.
When I go to the Search function in the Start Menu and search for one
computer from the other, I find the computer I am searching for. When I
open "My Network Places," and "Entire Network," and then the icon for
the local netowork, I see icons for both computers. When I open the
icon for the client from the host, or vice versa, I see the single
shared folder on the remote computer ("My Documents").
Then things go screwy. Whenever I try to open the My Documents folder
on the host computer from the client, I can see the two folders within
it ("My Music" and "My Pictures"). However, whenever I try to go any
further and open one of these two, nothing happens. The folders will
not open. Sometimes, after a couple of minutes, I get an error message
that says "The selected network resource is no longer available." Other
times, the window crashes (I get the "not responding" indication in the
Close Program dialog box). When this crash happens, and I close the
window manually, I have further problems when I try to shut down or
restart the computer. The desktop goes blank except for the cursor, and
it hangs. I have to reset the computer manually, and when it boots up
again it runs Scandisk.
Whenever I try to open the My Documents folder on the client computer
from the host, things are slightly different. In this case, I cannot
open the "My Documents" folder and see the "My Music" and "My Pictures"
folders. Instead, the My Documents folder fails to open, and after a
few minutes the window crashes (that is, I never get the error message
that I sometimes get on the client machine when working the other way).
Again, upon shutting down or restarting, the desktop clears and the
computer hangs. Scandisk runs upon restarting.
To complicate matters even further, it seems that the client computer
has some access to the Internet. I can ping some computers out on the
net, and I can access some web sites. For this to happen, both PA301s,
the FA310TX, and the cable modem must be cooperating. However, while
the client can access some web sites, it will not connect to all sites,
and it takes longer than it should to make the connections that it does
make.
The network was set up through the house phone wiring and working great
on February 24, 2001. On February 25, it stopped working. I had been
installing software on each machine, but I can't point to a particular
thing that immediately preceeded the network's failure. Currently the
two machines are side-by-side, connected by a 10-ft. phone cord that is
supplied with the PA301. This is equivalent to using the home wiring,
and it saves me running back and forth while troubleshooting.
Right now, TCP/IP on the PA301s is set up to automatically assign IP
addresses. This is being done appropriately. (The host is 192.168.0.1,
and the client is 192.168.0.2; both have 255.255.255.0 for the netmask.
The default gateway for the client is the host's IP address, as it
should be.) We have tried assigning static addresses, but it makes no
difference. We have uninstalled and reinstalled the card drivers. We
have uninstalled and reinstalled the protocols. We have Client for
Microsoft Networks and Printer and File sharing active on both
machines. We have share-level access control on both machines.
Most recently, we have backed up all of the data files on both computers
and reinstalled Windows Me on the client, and used the Dell ZZTOP
program to restore the host computer to its new-from-the-factory state.
Nothing makes a difference.
If anyone can suggest any course of action that will allow me to
actually access shared resources, that is, open remote files, on this
network, I would appreciate hearing from you.
Many thanks.
Patrick Knight
kni...@ksu.edu
bignews.shef.ac.uk
"Patrick Knight" <kni...@bearkan.com> wrote in message
news:3AABE06A...@bearkan.com...
> Right now, TCP/IP on the PA301s is set up to automatically assign IP
> addresses. This is being done appropriately. (The host is 192.168.0.1,
> and the client is 192.168.0.2; both have 255.255.255.0 for the netmask.
You got further than me with ICS then! Even my host ICS 2000 machine only
configures itself correctly when ICS is started. After a reboot it fails to
be 192.168.0.1 unless I give it that static IP address. Even its subnet
mask changes to 255.255.0.0. The documentation says that it should DHCP
itself but it doesn't! No other 2000 machine gets configured either unless
I put everything in statically, even DNS addresses, which means that working
with several ISPs is a no-go. One Win98 machine does get configured.
Mike