Ryman

The mystery has been solved at the firewall. I wasn't aware that the customer purchased a firewall model that only allows 12 simultaneous connections to the internet. Between a few AD users, a few other users, RAS connections listening for VPN, our monitoring laptop, and the server itself, we were exceeding the 12 connection limit. After we kicked everybody off in the DHCP console, the laptops were able to grab the first available IP addresses and got right out to the internet. We addressed the issue further by trimming back the listening RAS ports to only 3 and hunting down some "neighbors" down the hall that shouldn't be connected to our switch and getting addresses from our DHCP server in the first place. I think this will do it without requiring an upgrade of the firewall for more user licenses. Thank you to everyone who contributed feedback.

I have a LAN with one machine serving as a file server for six others. The file server is a 2000 pro machine, not server edition. All six other machines are XP pro. There are no machines running a server OS on the LAN. I want to put the file server in a closet, out of sight and out of reach. I would also like to get rid of the monitor, mouse and keyboard to prevent it from ever being used as a workstation. I can't figure out how to allow my XP machine to gain access to the 2000 pro machine via remote desktop when I need to get at it. Some threads on other forums indicated that this isn't really possible without installing a third party tool on the 2000 pro machine. However, the other threads were not quite the same scenario. Can anyone clear this up for me? Thanks!

Thank you for the feedback and suggestions. I won't be able to follow up again until Monday. I'll post my results sometime next week.

Yes, if I connect a laptop that is not normally part of the network (my own), it is able to ping external sites and has full internet connectivity. If I bring one of the laptops in question over to the switch and connect to an open port, it can see shares on the server, but cannot ping external addresses.

I have a conectivity problem that has me stumped. Please advise if I should post in another more relevant forum as well. I have 3 users connecting to SBS 2003 with their client desktop machines. Those machines work just fine. Each office has only one Ethernet connection and the users frequently disconnect from their desktop PC's and plug the ethernet cable into the adapter on their laptops. Unfortunately, this no longer seems to work for internet connectivity. The SBS server is providing DNS and DHCP. The laptops pick up a new IP address no problem, but cannot resolve externally. I can ping the server from the laptops and when I run Ipconfig /all, the settings are all identical to what I see if I run the same command when the desktop machines are on the ethernet cable, with the exception of a new IP address for the client. Here's the kicker, if I plug in my personal laptop (brought in just for t-shooting), I can get out on the internet just fine. The 3 client laptops also are able to get on the internet if they are taken to an external location. They can VPN in from home. I tried running ipconfig /release, /renew/, /flushdns, and /registerdns on the laptops, still no way to get out. All client machines are running XP pro. Ethernet cables are running from a 3com switch to each office. The switch sits behind a hardware firewall. Taking any of the laptops to the switch and trying another port doesn't seem to provide any better results, still no internet. All machines are configured to pick up an IP from DHCP. Any ideas?