I seem to be having an issue setting up my home network. I've got a tower with gigabit ethernet and a lappy with the same. So i picked up a linksys 5-port gigabit switch and some cat5e and went to work networking them together. I can't seem to get them to see each other on the switch however. Any suggestions?
You've could've saved money and used a crossover! Anyway, make sure your firewalls are off for now and make sure they are configured properly, set up a static IP as its easier. Then try pinging each computer. Don't use MS "My Network Places", it is slow and unreliable!
Slightly OT, but isn't it in the gigabit spec that the cards have to be autonegotiating too? So you don't even need a crossover to connect two gigabit cards?
Wouldn't auto-negoitating have nothing to do with knowing if it was a crossover or not because pretty much any card you buy is auto-negoitating and that just means it nows if to do 10mb full duplex 10mb half duplex 100mb full duplex 100mb half duplex and so on Edit- i feel that I am wrong about this am i right? I'm not sure im just 14 and just going by everything I have known before
Well if you have a router, you could just take the LAN cable and go from one of the LAN ports on the router to a port on the switch, and then connect your desktop and then your laptop to the switch with LAN cables, and it should pull IPs from the DHCP of the router. If you don't have anything that handles DHCP like a router or something, then you'll have to auto-assign an IP address via the network card properties. Make sure they're typically the same, but with 1 minor difference. Here's a few examples: Lappy: 10.15.172.1 Desktop: 10.15.172.2 Other: 10.15.172.3 etc... All you do is change the last number on the IP, if you're assigning IPs. Make sure the subnet is the same too, which should be 255.255.255.0 Another thing to kinda worry about is making sure that both PCs are in the same workgroup. If using either flavor of Windows XP, right click on My Computer, and go down to properties. There should be a tab that says "Identification" or something like that, I'm not really sure because I'm at school at the moment and they block every ****in thing, so just look to see if you see anything pertaining to a network name, workgroup, or whatever, and make sure the workgroup is the same on both PCs. Hope this helps, senor!
One thing I forgot to mention is that some switches do not allow port 1 to be used by a computer, only as a uplink, some may have a switch or button to alter this. Some may just be automatic. The other thing is that the computers do not need to be in a workgroup, all it does is group the computers in the workgroup to one folder. Have you tried typing in the IP address in the explorer address bar, like \\IPADDRESSHERE Make sure the drives/files are shared, and you should be able to view the files with this method.
As bassboi pointed out, you do need an IP address on each system. If you don't have a DHCP server (a server which hands out IP addresses to other systems) then you'll need to configure one manually - again, bassboi has the step-by-step. To check basic connectivity, go to Network in the control panel and double click on the network card. It will pop up a Connection Status box. This should show the speed as 1Gbps, and show some packets sent and received. If not, then you've got a problem at a pretty low level - check the cables, check the blinky lights on the switch, check that the NIC drivers are loaded and running correctly in Windows, etc. Next, ping the other computer. Open a DOS window and ping the IP of the other system: C:\> ping 10.15.172.2 See if you get a response. If so, good. If you get "request timed out" then type in: C:\> arp -a This should list the IP address, and the MAC address (hardware address, burnt into the network card when it's created) of the other system: Interface: 10.15.172.1 --- 0x10003 Internet Address Physical Address Type 10.15.172.2 00-09-5b-a8-ab-fe dynamic If you can't see the MAC addres, then go back and check that the IP addresses are the same (or at least similar) to what bassboi said above. If you do get a ping response, check that Windows Firewall / Norton Internet Security / etc is disabled on both systems, or preferably set up a rule to allow connections from other machines on the 10.15.172.x network. Share a folder and try connecting to it: \\10.15.172.2\shared HTH Buzzy
