Filesharing between wireless and lan?

[Muzukun]

H'lo,

I have a total of three comps, two macs and one PC, right now I'm trying to get one of the macs to just act as a drive monkey (all my external drives on that one mainly) yet I can't get the two macs to see eachother via the network.

For the sake of it, here's the setups:
Powerbook: Connected through wireless, running Tiger
G3 Tower: Running 10.3, connected through lan
WinXP: Connected through lan

The PC can connect to the powerbook if I flat out give it the ip. And the Mac and PC see eachother and network together wonderfully, however the powerbook over wireless can't see either computer, nor access them at all (but the pc can still access the pb like I said before).

Mainly I'm wondering is there any way I can actually network the two macs together without having to resort to putting the pb on the lan? They're technically all connected through the same router yet I just can't get the two macs to communicate with eachother from lan to wifi.

Any ideas? ^-^;; thanks!

 

[GimmeSlack12]

For the Macs go to the Sharing Preferences and turn on Personal File Sharing.

 

[apfhex]

Well, technically the wireless is part of your LAN as well; LAN means your whole local network, not just the wired part. But I understand what you mean anyway.

So if I understand you, everything works when wired. And both the PC and G3 can connect to the PB when it's wireless, but the PB can't see the PC or G3? Have you tried the PB with a wire? Because there shouldn't be any difference between wired and wireless as far as the computers being able to see eachother on the network, so it might be a configuration issue on the PB.

 

[Nermal]

Is your wireless base configured as a router or a bridge?

 

[Muzukun]

Well, technically the wireless is part of your LAN as well; LAN means your whole local network, not just the wired part. But I understand what you mean anyway.

So if I understand you, everything works when wired. And both the PC and G3 can connect to the PB when it's wireless, but the PB can't see the PC or G3? Have you tried the PB with a wire? Because there shouldn't be any difference between wired and wireless as far as the computers being able to see eachother on the network, so it might be a configuration issue on the PB.

well yeah, knew that they are one and the same but seeing as issues just pop up when I have the pb go wireless I figured I'd make a big deal out of the difference ^-^;

and yeah, tried plugging the pb in and bam, works perfectly, everyone sees eachother, and networking is wonderful.

as far as I know the wireless base should be configured as a router. However the router is elsewhere in the house and through my room I have a hub attached to the router to which the G3 and PC are attached while the pb has a connection to the router itself. Would that make a difference?

Is there any chance that if I just went to fry's bought a cheapy USB wifi adapter for my PC and had it act as an access point I could solve all of this?

 

[Nermal]

as far as I know the wireless base should be configured as a router. However the router is elsewhere in the house and through my room I have a hub attached to the router to which the G3 and PC are attached while the pb has a connection to the router itself. Would that make a difference?

So you have your wireless base configured as a router, and have a separate router that the other computers are using? Reconfigure your base to be a bridge, so that only one device is doing the routing.

With an AirPort base, this can be done on the Network tab, by unticking "Distribute IP addresses."

 

[Muzukun]

So you have your wireless base configured as a router, and have a separate router that the other computers are using? Reconfigure your base to be a bridge, so that only one device is doing the routing.

With an AirPort base, this can be done on the Network tab, by unticking "Distribute IP addresses."

umm... I probably got confused. As far as I know the router is a combination wireless base and router, yet I have a separate wired hub connected to it for the G3 and PC.

 

[Nermal]

Ahh OK, disregard what I said then, I'm out of ideas

 

[Puzz]

Some hubs have an 'uplink' port for the connection back to the router, with a 2-way pushbutton beside to make it a proper uplink. Make sure that the router-to-hub wire is plugged into the uplink port, and that the uplink port is set to uplink.

What kind of box is the 'hub'? Is it truly a "Hub", or is it an old home router (maybe leftover from before you got the wireless box?) In that case it might be creating a separate subnet for the wired machines, and interfering with discovery from the laptop... just speculation.

One thing you could try is to get a 4-port switch; they're tiny little boxes, quite cheap, and new ones are often a lot less troublesome than older cheap home network stuff. And you know there's nothing funny going on with them; older stuff sometimes had "helpful" features that you don't want.

The setup you've described <looks around room> is straightforward and should work perfectly.

Can you get to the internet with all three machines?