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Advanced Windows 7 & Mac Networking

M

mainstone

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 18, 2012
4
0
Hi,

Firstly this isn't very advanced... just more so than the information I've managed to find this evening.

I have a home network, based around a wireless router which our internet is distributed by. The connection is fine for internet but not great for file sharing.

I take a lot of pictures and save them all on my desktop pc. This is sadly a windows machine running win7. I have been using this for a good few years, it has an internal RAID5 array which I store the images on.

I am not looking to access these files from my mac using a faster interface than the wireless which is already set up. My mac has a gigabyte ethernet port as does my desktop. I have purchased a crossover cable to save buying a switch.

I have set up file sharing on the wireless network which work albiet very slowly by looking on the network on my mac, waiting till my windows machine appears, logging on using my normal credentials and having access to my files.

If I try and make the mac use the wired connection instead by going to the finder Go>Connect to a Server and then typing in 192.168.0.100 for example in searches for about a minute and then returns nothing. I can ping the machine and get a response.

From what I can diagnose myself is that the unidentified crossover cable network is not liked by windows at all and won't allow sharing of files. This is just an inkling though.

Any help or suggestions would be massively appreciated.

Thanks,

Finn
 
IlikeMacsSoMuch

IlikeMacsSoMuch

macrumors 6502
Dec 30, 2009
346
2
Blainville, Province of Quebec
mainstone said:
Hi,

Firstly this isn't very advanced... just more so than the information I've managed to find this evening.

I have a home network, based around a wireless router which our internet is distributed by. The connection is fine for internet but not great for file sharing.

I take a lot of pictures and save them all on my desktop pc. This is sadly a windows machine running win7. I have been using this for a good few years, it has an internal RAID5 array which I store the images on.

I am not looking to access these files from my mac using a faster interface than the wireless which is already set up. My mac has a gigabyte ethernet port as does my desktop. I have purchased a crossover cable to save buying a switch.

I have set up file sharing on the wireless network which work albiet very slowly by looking on the network on my mac, waiting till my windows machine appears, logging on using my normal credentials and having access to my files.

If I try and make the mac use the wired connection instead by going to the finder Go>Connect to a Server and then typing in 192.168.0.100 for example in searches for about a minute and then returns nothing. I can ping the machine and get a response.

From what I can diagnose myself is that the unidentified crossover cable network is not liked by windows at all and won't allow sharing of files. This is just an inkling though.

Any help or suggestions would be massively appreciated.

Thanks,

Finn
Click to expand...

It's been years since I've used this kind of configuration but don't you have (at least on the windows side) to configure a network for the crossover connection? Ya know, per to per or something?

Or doesn't your router have ethernet ports? If so you could use it to connect both computer together. But why isn't your wifi enough? At home everything is connected via wifi except for 1 computer out of 5 and nothing ever lags or anything even when my three sons stream hd video on three ATV at the same time while I surf the internet.

Do you use wireless N? Or do you use a mixed signal?
 
M

mainstone

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 18, 2012
4
0
Thanks!

Cheers for the replies guys.

Firstly, I need to reiterate that this isn't a problem I'm having with networking. I mentioned that I've done that over the wifi with no problems, but thanks for the guide, seen it before but had another read over it to check there was nothing I'd missed.

To the other reply, I'm looking to transfer about 16GB of image data weekly and our router isn't N enabled so is very sluggish.

I've configured the crossover cable network using basic settings 192.168.0.100 & 192.168.0.150 with a subnet of 255.255.255.0

I've tried using a ghost gateway because sometimes this allows the network to be recognised as 'Home', I think I said it last time but I think the crux of the problem is that the windows side isn't happy until it's seen a router.

On another side note, if I bridge the connections on my PC, ie. allow the networks to become transparent, then the mac is able to see the DHCP of the router is configured by that, windows is happy because it verifies the home network and transfer is easy.

This solution is not ideal though since when the eithernet cable is disconnected then the PC network bridge falls apart and the PC is no longer able to connect to the internet since the bridge appears 'disconnected'.

Hopefully this clears things up a bit.

This post is not about a problem with sharing files, that's very easy.... the problem is network related. Thanks!
 
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