Mac and Windows 7 Networking Problem

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

In general crossover cables are for sharing an internet connection, sharing with a crossover cable isn't what I'd call reliable but it can be made to work.

If you want this to work right just purchase a switch or plug the LAN cable into one of the extra ports on your router. :)

There are many online tutorials for sharing between a MAC and a PC, there are even video's for this on Youtube.

Thanks,

Although a crossover cable, from my understanding, swaps the tx and rx wires between connections. Therefore just performs the task of a switch.

I've used them many times in the past for transferring files from an old machine to a new one.

I'm not convinced that is the problem.

I also don't need a tutorial. I'm well aware of how to share files between pc and mac's. The post explains that, I can do it.

I'd just rather utilise the gigabit connection rather than the wifi.

Sorry if this seems ungrateful but I've posted this on a few forums and everyone just tells me to look at guides which I've obviously done. No worries if you've no more suggestions.

Thanks for your help.

What you were trying to do was to share a wireless connection with a wired connection and that is simply not meant to be. Just because it worked at one time does not mean it will work again, it's simply not done that way at all and it appears that you were misinformed about this.

Sharing a wireless connection is a completely different procedure and it's called a hosted wireless network. There is no correct procedure for sharing a wireless connection through a wired LAN port on the same machine.

The correct way would be to plug one of those machines into the LAN port on the router, then using a separate PCI network card, you would share out the wired connection through that network card to the other machine. In fact you shouldn't even need to use a crossover cable.

This is one of the many reasons that it's much easier and more simple to install a switch for sharing a wired LAN connection.

Thanks for getting back to me.

Erm I think we've gone completely off point. I can't connect the machines to the router due to location issues. Also the router is old and only has 10Mbps ports.

I'll make it simpler..... consider this:

The wifi doesn't exist. I need the gigabit speeds for transferring large sized files. I have 2 machines (lets say both PCs) I connect them together using the crossover cable. I set the IP's, share the relevant folders and maybe even map them in explorer. Easy! Done it many times before and with windows 7 it's even easier than that with homegroups etc.

Now consider one PC one Mac. Carrying out the same procedure, on the PC I can view the Mac's shared files. HOWEVER... When I go to the Finder>Go>Connect to Server, and type in the IP address of the PC. It can't connect.

Why?

Thanks in advance!

On the mac when you hit connect to server are you putting in SMB://x.x.x.x as that should work fine