Networking Issues (Firewall)

[sanity1977]

Hi Guys

I'll explain my main objective first. I have a SBS 2003 server setup with three workstations (Vista, XP Pro, Mediacenter) I want to share three folders on my MCE and be able to access them from at the very least the XP Pro machine. That's it.

I appreciate that has no domain support. I wouldn't expect this would cause no access to these shares tho. These three machines are connected via wireless networking. The server on the other hand is connected to my Wireless ADSL Gateway via ethernet.

At this stage the no additional firewalls have been installed on the actual systems and I have tried to disable the firewall completely on the MCE to no avail. I am able to ping the server and the gateway with no problems at all from any machine on the network. I would expect to be able to ping client to client eg XP Pro/MCE, MCE/XP Pro, Vista/XP Pro, XP Pro/Vista etc. but this does not happen. Request is timed out.

I can even access all three shares on the MCE from the server just not from any client. This sounds to me like a firewall issue? right? Is there a port that I need to be opening? I allready have File & Print Sharing open on the clients but the fact that it's only a problem between clients makes me wonder. Could it be something to do with the gateway firewall?

Any help would be greatly appreciated guys. I had this all set up previously and it worked fine but I have just rebuilt the SBS server (My second time) and it doesn't want to work. Things that are different are the new Gateway (NB9W) and the wireless cards.

[cluberti]

At this point, if you can access the shares on the MCE box from the server but not the client, I'd think there's not a firewall issue (if there was, you probably wouldn't have been able to get to the MCE box from the server, correct?). I'd say first disable the firewall on all client machines and see if the issue continues - this will at least either rule out the firewall or define it as the culprit. Assuming the issue occurs after disabling the firewalls, make sure all of the clients are configured with IP addresses on the same network subnet, with the same subnet mask, the same DNS and WINS servers (if configured), and the same default gateway. Once that's confirmed, get a network trace from both a client attempting to access a share on the MCE box, and a network trace from the MCE box itself (both traces run at the same time) - either via Ethereal/Wireshark or Netmon. Again, if it fails after disabling firewalls and configuring the network properly, the only sure-fire way to troubleshoot is to see what is happening across the wire (the fact that ping fails bothers me, especially if the firewalls are disabled - this would lead me to believe the network configuration is incorrect on one or more of the machines).

[sanity1977]

Thanks for replying cluberti. All machines are on the same subnet with the same gateway and DNS servers. I haven't yet tried doing a trace. I've never done that before so I will download one of those programs you mentioned and try it. I really cannot understand why this isn't connecting through. I even moved one of my workstations from the domain to the same workgroup as the MCE and still no luck. I don't think it's a domain issue anymore I think it's to do with wireless networking or perhaps somethings screwed up on the mediacenter but I really don't like rebuilding the media center cause it's such a pain to get working correctly.

[hons]

Sanity1977,

You will not get reply from the machine that has XP SP2 and the firewall is "ON". The Windows firewall blocked the ICMP Ping Echo function.

In the Domain, if you want to share a folder, you need to set both "Share" and " Security" on that folder to allow access by the "Domain Users". Did you set that????