Inevitability one is forced into a PC upgrade at some point. This is always a painful time consuming process, not the least of which is getting the new PC to integrate into the existing home office network - a mixture of desktop’s and laptop, XP pro and XP home. Luckily we had standardised our security so there was only one firewall style to deal with.
The solution to getting the PC’s to see each other was to download onto one of the XP machines, the Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) Responder (don’t you love that name) from microsoft, to enable the Vista PC to see th other PC’s.
- Unplug from the internet - ie run lan without the internet for safety sake.
- Disable norton on all PC’s temporarily
- Check who can see who and if necessary update your router’s security for the various PC’s. We had to add the MAC addresses (start/run / cmd / ipconfig/all to determine the MAC address of the ethernet and/or wireless adaptors). I realised that the non-vista’s could see the vista PC but not vice versa. A quick google revealed the LLTD anomaly. I downloaded and ran it on the lowest risk PC. Lo and behold, I only did that PC and then Vista could see all the XP (home and pro) PCs.
- Enable Norton again, adding the MAC addresses to the trusted computers of each PC, and away we went. Okay maybe a few reboots here and there….