Classical Me laptop and XP Pro desktop

A complicated one:

On the ground floor of my home, I have a Verizon DSL modem to which I
connected a router to share the DSL feed.
On the ground floor through that router one computer is connected to the
internet and runs XP Pro.

On the first floor, I have 3 PCs (all running XP Pro), one laptop (running
Me) and one Mac feeding off the router on the ground floor to connect to the
internet.

I am right now on my laptop and in this room have one of the 3 PCs running
XP Pro. These two machines I have created a network place called MINE. In my
Network Places from the Me laptop, I double-click Entire Network and can see
three different Network Places:

MSHOME (the PC on the ground floor), MINE and WORKGROUP (two other PCs on
the first floor).

From the laptop, if I double click MINE I can see my laptop and the desktop
in this room sharing this network place.
From the laptop, if I double click MSHOME, I can see the PC on the ground
floor and I am prompted for a password to access it.
From the laptop, if I double click WORKGROUP, I can see the 2 other PCs on
the first floor and am prompted for a password to access either one.

My question:
How can insure that my laptop and my PC in this room cannot be accessed from
the other machines at all (reason why I created a different Network Place
but I suspect MINE is visible to the other machines if browsed through
Entire Network) or only through a password?

Thank you in advance for the help.




Joe Merk

In article <#(E-Mail Removed)>, Joe Merk says...

> A complicated one:

> On the ground floor of my home, I have a Verizon DSL modem to which I
> connected a router to share the DSL feed.
> On the ground floor through that router one computer is connected to the
> internet and runs XP Pro.

> On the first floor, I have 3 PCs (all running XP Pro), one laptop (running
> Me) and one Mac feeding off the router on the ground floor to connect to the
> internet.

> I am right now on my laptop and in this room have one of the 3 PCs running
> XP Pro. These two machines I have created a network place called MINE. In my
> Network Places from the Me laptop, I double-click Entire Network and can see
> three different Network Places:

> MSHOME (the PC on the ground floor), MINE and WORKGROUP (two other PCs on
> the first floor).

> From the laptop, if I double click MINE I can see my laptop and the desktop
> in this room sharing this network place.
> From the laptop, if I double click MSHOME, I can see the PC on the ground
> floor and I am prompted for a password to access it.
> From the laptop, if I double click WORKGROUP, I can see the 2 other PCs on
> the first floor and am prompted for a password to access either one.

> My question:
> How can insure that my laptop and my PC in this room cannot be accessed from
> the other machines at all (reason why I created a different Network Place
> but I suspect MINE is visible to the other machines if browsed through
> Entire Network) or only through a password?

> Thank you in advance for the help.

You are right; it is complicated. I suspect that the workgroup layout was
intended to group related computers, but not, necessarily, to isolate
computers within the groups.

I have an idea about how achieve what you want by breaking up the LAN IP
space into subnets, by setting up different subnet masks. It is a bit
lengthy to write it up, and I haven't tested it personally. It would require
turning off the DHCP service in the router and manually configuring each
computer so it is in a subnet with a limited range of IP addresses. I don't
know if a real network expert would approve of this approach. But I envision
breaking up the IP address range as follows:

192.168.1.0 - 192.168.1.64, with the router at 1, and one other computer at
any address between 2 and 63.

192.168.1.64 - 192.168.1.127, with the computers at any address between 65
and 126.

192.168.1.128 - 192.168.1.255, with the computers at any address between 129
and 254.

As long as all computers are configured to use 192.168.1.1 as the gateway,
they should all see the Internet; but they should not be able to see any
computer outside of the range limits of the IP address assigned to them. At
least, I think it should work, even without routers in each subnet. If
somebody who actually wires networks for a living should tell me that I am
wrong, though...

--
Norman
~Win dain a lotica, En vai tu ri, Si lo ta
~Fin dein a loluca, En dragu a sei lain
~Vi fa-ru les shutai am, En riga-lint