Building The Dream

Just discovered something in windows file and printer sharing.

One of the staff in my office asked me why she couldn’t see other computers in her “My Network Places”. Hmm… this I had predicted before.

Last Saturday, I changed the topology of our office network. Formerly, our office network is a flat network and the router was outside our building, in the NOC building. We just had a cisco WS-C3524-XL which connecting our network through the router using VLAN. This kind of network I inherited from the previous network administrator in my office. I hate this kind of topology because It makes me difficult to manage my network.

After changing the cabling topology, I installed a PC-based router and divided my flat network into 2 subnets based on the organizations in my office. FYI, in my office, there are 2 organizations that have different management. Everything was under control until I found out that some computers that shared same hub doesn’t has connection to one of the segment as I intended. It is connected to different segment. It was so late, so I decided to go home. Just a bit of change on some computers can be done later, I thought.

And as I had predicted before, there was a complain in the Monday afternoon .

I searched on the Microsoft website to find the possible solution. I found out a solution to modify the firewall on the corresponding computer. It didn’t say about scoping explicitly, but it was a good start. From “Windows Firewall” window, I found “Exceptions” tab. Scrolling down, I saw that “File and Printer Sharing” already checked. Looking deeper in the options, I found that the default option is subnet.

By changing “subnet” option to “custom” and filling to the intended subnet, the corresponding PC can decide which other PCs that can connect to it.