Hello,

I am currently an Avionics Tech and doing a favor for a neighboring shop. Since out of the group here, I'm deemed the most network saavy. Essentially they need 3 machines to be able to pull publications to their desktop from a central hard drive.

So basically I have 3 machines running Win2k that I need to connect to a lan and add a 4th box with whatever OS on it to act as a central file sharer. The 3 machines running Win2k have admin privilages, but come preloaded from the engineers of the machine. They also have Avast Suite running on each of them. Although I can't remove or install any software on the three machines. I can adjust any settings though.

I have a linksys wrt54g that I'm connecting via cat5 to each of the machines. The central "server" that I'm running for proof of concept is my laptop with Vista. I have Win2k, Win2k Server, WinXP, and Win7 all in virtual to play with and see if one would work better then the other.

I was working on this 2 weeks ago and was able to get one of the machines to see Vista in the workgroup through the lan. I went back yesterday because I thought I had it figured out. Now the win2k machine doesn't see the workgroup. It won't even pull up the router web interface. At first it didn't even have a default gateway, I gave it one and still didn't work, so I switched back to auto and it found one. Although even when I did have it seeing the vista computer in the workgroup it would not connect. Saying something along the lines of can't access because of permissions. Though the vista has a public folder, all folders shared, and no firewalls at all.

All router security is disabled. Win2k everything is disable, though the firewall still blocks traffic. So I turned the firewall back on and created a rule that allowed all network traffic and it seemed to fix it. Even though the win2k can't see anything in the workgroup and cant see router web interface, I can still successfully ping my vista computer. :/

Workgroup for all machines: Rtcass Network
Ip of win2k machine: 192.168.1.100
Ip of vista computer: 192.168.1.101
default gateway: 192.168.1.1

As I side note, I set up filezilla server for FTP and tried to access ftp://192.168.1.101 to no avail on win2k machines.

I'm sure there is more information needed, please ask!

TIA!