PC and Mac won't communicate on network....router issue?

[Fat Sweaty Elvis]

The firewall settings on Windows 7 are pretty complex. There are several pages of "rules" with a lot of technical language.

In my searching I read somewhere that ports 137-139 are the ones that count for windows file-sharing. Attached are my firewall rules for those ports. Do they look ok you think? I realize that massive zooming is necessary to read them :-(

Thanks.

[clanmills]

Hi

I run Tiger (10.4) on my 5 year old PowerBook Pro (PPC) and Leopard on my 24" iMac (Intel). I use VMware fusion and I have virtual machines running XP, Vista-64 and Ubuntu. I use these systems for a couple of opensouce projects to which I contribute.

It certainly sounds like a firewall problem. I don't think I have ever messed with the firewall on my Macs and as I said, everything works fine. If ping and smbclient cannot talk to windows, you're in a lot of trouble. Can you confirm that your Mac network card's working - you can browse the internet, right?

Your screen shots are too small for my old eyes - however it certainly looks as though you're doing the right things. You're welcome to email me directly and attach the screenshots.

[Fat Sweaty Elvis]

Clanmills,

Since turning off the Macbook's "stealth mode," I am able to ping both ways successfully. I can access my home directory on the Macbook from the PC but still cannot see the PC from the Macbook's Finder window. This is important because the PC is the desktop machine with the big hard drives and the printer.

I would greatly appreciate it if you could review my firewall configuration and whatever other settings you think may be relevant. Could you tell what your email address is? I looked at your profile but didn't see it. (maybe I didn't look hard enough). Send it by PM if you prefer.

Thank you for trying to help.

Originally Posted by clanmills

Hi

I run Tiger (10.4) on my 5 year old PowerBook Pro (PPC) and Leopard on my 24" iMac (Intel). I use VMware fusion and I have virtual machines running XP, Vista-64 and Ubuntu. I use these systems for a couple of opensouce projects to which I contribute.

It certainly sounds like a firewall problem. I don't think I have ever messed with the firewall on my Macs and as I said, everything works fine. If ping and smbclient cannot talk to windows, you're in a lot of trouble. Can you confirm that your Mac network card's working - you can browse the internet, right?

Your screen shots are too small for my old eyes - however it certainly looks as though you're doing the right things. You're welcome to email me directly and attach the screenshots.

[clanmills]

it's robin at clanmills dot com.

[clanmills]

I have a couple of suggestions:

1) Turn off the firewall on your windows machine. You shouldn't have to do this permanently - however let's eliminate it as the trouble maker for now.

Try smbclient again from the command line. If you see a sharename with type Disk, then:

2) Open the Finder and Go/Connect to Server (or command/k)
Enter: smb://pcname/sharename (for my wife's machine it's smb://ali/k

563 /Users/rmills/bin> smbclient -L Ali
Password: 
Domain=[ALI] OS=[Windows 5.1] Server=[Windows 2000 LAN Manager]

	Sharename       Type      Comment
	---------       ----      -------
	K               Disk      
	W (E)           Disk      
	IPC$            IPC       Remote IPC
	SharedDocs      Disk      
	print$          Disk      Printer Drivers
	Epson           Printer   EPSON Stylus Photo R200 Series
	Alison          Disk      
	E               Disk      
	Printer2        Printer   Creates Adobe PDF
	W               Disk      
Domain=[ALI] OS=[Windows 5.1] Server=[Windows 2000 LAN Manager]

	Server               Comment
	---------            -------

	Workgroup            Master
	---------            -------
564 /Users/rmills/bin>

If you can ping your PC, you can use nmap to find the ports which are available on the PC:

609 /Users/rmills/bin> ping -c 1 ali
PING ali (192.168.2.104): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.2.104: icmp_seq=0 ttl=128 time=0.262 ms

--- ali ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.262/0.262/0.262/0.000 ms
610 /Users/rmills/bin> nmap -PN ali

Starting Nmap 4.76 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2009-08-19 22:04 PDT
Interesting ports on ali (192.168.2.104):
Not shown: 996 filtered ports
PORT     STATE  SERVICE
139/tcp  open   netbios-ssn
443/tcp  open   https
445/tcp  open   microsoft-ds
2869/tcp closed unknown

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 4.26 seconds
611 /Users/rmills/bin>

You'll have to google, download and build nmap (it's not provided by Apple). However if you have XCode installed, this is a 5 minute task.

A different approach is to install IIS on the PC. This is also an FTP server and you can connect to the PC using the ftp command-line program. That's pretty basic - however it is a step in the right direction.

Finder can mount FTP servers - however they are readonly ftp://username:password@servername

You can get a MacFuse FTP thing which offers read-write FTP services - however I haven't had much happiness in getting that to work.