drive sharing over lan - driving me nuts

ok here is scenario,

originally worked fine on a simple lan setup. between 2 windows 7 machines. same subnet ip range.

I then routed a static internet ip to this desktop machine and of course assigned new gateway to it. the other machine left on the old lan ip range as routing that over other internet connection. these machines are all still on same physical network.

I then added a lan ip to this machine as a second ip on the interface.

this got the other machine able to see this machine shared drives and am able to connect to other machine over remote desktop on lan ip. at this stage I assumed was all fixed.

noticed today I could not from this machine access shared drives on other machine so one way traffic. boh machines can ping each other fine of course.

so thought hmm maybe its because the net ip is first on the interface and lan 2nd so deleted both ip's and made sure lan ip added first, I thought bingo as I was able to access other machine again from this machine, but guess what. The other machine then couldnt see the drives on this machine, so I reversed the one way traffic.

I then played with netbios settings unsure of the role of netbios on modern file sharing and enabled ipv6 on this nic. Now both machines can access each others shared drives but ONLY if I manually know the machine name, here is what I mean. I have 2 explorer windows open on this machine, the first window has the other machine name already listed in left window as remembered it from earlier, so I can click on it there and see all shared drives. If I open a new window the machine doesnt show, and in addition if I click on network in the first window I dont see the other machine, so the drives are accessible but the machine doesnt show itself in the network window. Same on other machine, can access the drives on here but only if I manually type the network address in or have a window which has remembered the name on the left. In addition the machine randomly appears in the network window and then goes again.

This is where I am now.

So this machine

192.168.1.124 and <internet ip> assigned to nic.
192.168.1.125 assigned to other machine.

result dodgy file sharing.

I'm not sure about the IP assignments but if you really need to share entire drives you need to go into the Security Tab of the drive and allow for permissions there as well. Although for a LAN network to work correctly your machines will need to be using the same gateway address. From a security standpoint you would be better off sharing the entire User folder instead.

that side of things is fine, its not a user permission problem. I am not getting access denied messages.

Joules said:

It sounds exactly like my homegroup setup the moment I get both computer seeing each other and everything is fine everything changes after a reboot or something else, I wish I could help ya but this has me confused as well even though your going a different way than I am, it's the most damn frustrating thing I've come across..I do know that windows firewall has to be running along with the dns clients cause when they weren't running then it really was impossible. My 3rd party firewall isn't helping matters either...

No doubt your third party firewall is the root of the problem. You can usually configure them to allow for the range of IP's which you are using in order to get sharing to work past the firewall.

Joules yeah I forgot to mention firewall situation.

no 3rd party firewall on either machine, both machines have windows firewall enabled.

the other machine I manually added an allow rule to allow any traffic from my static net ip range, this improved things which indicates this machine may be sending out random file sharing traffic out on the wrong ip to the other machine. I have of course tried disabling the firewall on both machines but to no fix.

edit firewall settings for 3 zones to allow file sharing... sounds like your stuck in public-ville on the firewall (highest security)?

brady said:

edit firewall settings for 3 zones to allow file sharing... sounds like your stuck in public-ville on the firewall (highest security)?

is set to private, and of course I did say I have tried with firewall actually disabled

anta said:

you may find some clues in your event logs.

ok got this for about 6 hours ago.

The master browser has received a server announcement from the computer CHRIS-TESTPC that believes that it is the master browser for the domain on transport NetBT_Tcpip_{BAB0EDE4-F2D2-4742-A81A-A6E7575F12FA}. The master browser is stopping or an election is being forced.

looks like thats it tho, nothing else in there related.

Joules said:

You guys are right in my lan setting in my third party firewall I forgot to make it trusted to both computers 2 little check boxes and that was it...Thanks for the reminder I can't believe that something like that was eating my lunch...

Well at least it was easy to configure, some aren't so easy. Glad you have it working.