Home LAN Problems

[jcwilkins]

I'm new to Wireless networking, but have been setting up wired lans for a few years now. I purchased a Dlink AP1000 access point and two Dlink DWL-650 PC Cards for the laptop computers that I use for work.

I installed the access point in a central location in the house, and then installed the PC Cards in my laptop computers. I currently have two laptops and three desktop workstations. The Access Point and workstations are connected to a Linksys BEFSR41 Cable/DSL Router running DHCP and connecting all my computers to my DSL Modem.

I got everything up and talking, and all shares on the workstations were accessible. Here's the problem:

I take my laptop to work and use it to connect to their wireless lan. When I return home at the end of the day, I can get Internet access but can nolonger access any of the network shares. So far, I've run "ipconfig /all", "ipconfig /release", and "ipconfig /renew" to make sure that the proper IP addresses were being assigned to my laptop. I also checked "Netbios over TCP/IP" to make sure that it was enabled. It was.

Oh, I'm running WindowsXP Professional on my laptop and Windows 2000 on my workstations.

I also went so far as to load Windows2000 Server on one of the systems and setup Active Directory and DNS. All workstations have been made members of the Domain including my "other" laptop that doesn't leave the house. My laptop that I take to work with me won't join the Domain even after I adjusted the DNS settings that the DHCP server hands out.

I can ping the "fully qualified domain name" but get no response from the standard "Netbios name".

At this point I'm pretty much at my wits end. I've tried everything I can think of to get my laptop that I take to work to talk to my LAN at the house.

If anyone can shed some light on a solution, I would greatly appreciate it.

- jcwilkins

[ua549]

You can't ping a NetBios name since they are different than FQDN.
Can you access shares if you enter the UNC, \\computername\sharename, in Windows Explorer?

Check your NetBIOS tables by using NBTSTAT from a command window. You can attempt to flush and reload the cache.

I would suggest configuring an LMHOSTS file to map IP addresses to NetBIOS names, however you do not have static IP addresses. An alternative is to set up WINS. A domain with AD, DNS and WINS is alot of overhead for a home network.

You could setup NetBEUI protocol, but I don't recomment doing so because it is no longer distributed with Windows and is being phased out.

You would consume significantly less server overhead by using the workgroup model and static IP addresses with HOSTS and LMHOSTS files configured.

[jcwilkins]

Hey,

Thanks for the input. I've already killed the DHCP server and changed to all static IP addresses. (This is since my last post)

I'm going to take your advice and setup a WINS server on my Windows2000 Server box. As for overhead, I'm not concerned about it. I'm currently studying to get my MCSE (3 more tests) and having a Domain infrastructure makes for a good computer lab setup. My server is running a 1Ghz PIII with 512MB of RAM. Should be enough :)

Thanks again. I'll let you know how it works out.

- jcwilkins

[jburnslht]

I had set up my Home and Office Network with the DLink 713P and the DWL 650 PCMCIA Card and all was well but then I got greedy and upgraded my laptop to XP Home and now I cannot get my DWL 650 card to configure. I see you're using that card on XP Prof. any advice? The Home PC is XP and the office PC's are all W98.

[jcwilkins]

I would go into "Device Manager" on your laptop and uninstall the driver for your DWL 650, then go to D-Links website and download the driver that they have posted for WindowsXP. I tried installing the driver that came with my card when I bought it and got terrible results. After you get the XP drivers installed go into Network Properties for your DWL 650 and configure the card to match the settings that you have in your access point.

That's all I had to do. WindowsXP also automatically detected my access point after I got the right drivers installed.

Good Luck!

- jcwilkins