Please help - Trouble setting up network

I admit that I am a total idiot where anything technically demanding is concerned, but I really want to make this work.

I have two 10.2 machines with airport cards and an Airport base station. One mac is connected to the station. I have AppleTalk via Airport turned on for both, and Personal File Sharing, FTP and Remote Login are all turned on. Both computers can access the Internet just fine. What they can't do is access each other, and I have tried more than one method:

Finder > Go > Connect to Server > ...
I can see my computer by doing this. I can also see about a thousand others because I live on campus and am using the campus LAN. But when I click on my other computer, it asks for a name and password. It defaults to my user name which is the same on both computers, but the password field is blank. It hasn't accepted anything I've tried. How/where do I set the password? Am I missing something? (I can login as guest, but can only use the drop box if I lower the permissions on it so that everyone on the campus LAN can use it, which is not acceptable.)

The other method is to set up a temporary Computer to Computer Network via Airport. I can log both computers in, but I can't see anything after I do this. Finder > Go > Connect to Server produces only the computer I am using (not the other I hope to connect to). Alternatively, Finder > Go > Computer shows nothing, nor does Computer > Network—here, under servers, I see only the computer I am using. How do I actually use the computer to computer network? So far it seems pointless.


My final question is if there is a way to make it possible to access not just the public folder drop box, but all of the folders and files of the other computer on my network (assuming, of course, that I can even figure out how to connect them). If so, how, specifically is this done?

 

Thanks. That explained a lot and gave me the faith to try harder with that password. It turns out that the user name was screwed up. The log in window would default to My Name when what I needed to do was change it to the shortname: myname. Now I can connect over my campus network beautifully, although I have no idea how sevure the connection is. I'm also still stumped about the computer to computer connection.