Need help configuring 2 XP pc's on a Billion 743GE

[hybrid]

I have 2 XP machines and a billion 743GE, both will surf the net fine but are unable to ping or talk to each other. Their configurations are below

PC1
IP 192.168.1.1
subnet 255.255.255.0
default gateway 192.168.1.254

PC2
IP 192.168.1.2
subnet 255.255.255.0
default gateway 192.168.1.254

I have also tried setting up static IP and also DHCP will not success.

I have also disabled the firewall on both machines

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Ray]

Hi,

Have you tried running network setup wizard on both computers?

I have found this to work a couple of times when everything else seemed OK but computers couldn't talk to one another. Try enabling dhcp on the 743 and using the windows default settings.

Regards,

Ray

[gstark]

What firewalls are you running on each of the XP boxes? Have you disabled the built-in XP firewalls?

[hybrid]

Thanks,

I found out that the problem was with norton personal firewall(NPF) 2002 of one of the xp pc's. The other pc has NPF2003. Even though I disabled NPF2002 it would let any inbound or outbound comms on the lan. So I unistalled it and reinstalled 2003 edition on it and all is ok.

I still don't know why this happened, because if I connected the 2 pcs with ICS via dialup they would see each other.

Does anyone recommend a different firewall program. As I received NPF free with my pc's when I bought them?

Also I have noticed that when I try to download a file from a web site it sometimes states that I am leeching the file from another site, when I am definitely on the host site. Is this something to do with NAT?

[gstark]

You paid about the right price for your copies of NPF.

Does your router have a firewall built in? If so, why is that not good enough?

Without looking at the configurations for each of your systems, I can't say why it disabled your intranet, but my guess would be that it was misconfigured. That seems to be the default state for most of Norton's products these days.

ZoneAlarm might be a better choice for you if you need a local firewall on your systems.