Yeah, that’s right, first dose of ‘actual’ networking (small).

Been dealing with computers for 9 years now. Built some, burnt some, fixed some, made money from it, wasted money sometimes. But this time, it is a breakthrough for me. “Networking”. The kind of stuff I am reading for the past few months now, but never really laid hand on it (on my own).

We have one computer at home. A PC clone. AMD Duron. My wife bought it when she was in college (3 years ago). Upgraded it and made it work better than before. Last December, I was able to get Internet connection (SmartBro, a wireless internet provider, too much headache though).

Then few days before the end of 2007, my father-in-law received a gift from her sister living in CA. It is a Dell Latitude D620 portable.

Now, we have a printer (Canon IP1200) connected to the desktop. My in-law uses his portable now. And everytime he needs to print, I have to get my USB drive and copy the file/s from the portable to the desktop and then print it. It is time consuming and a bit of a headache.

I was planning to but a wireless capable router to fix  this small problem. But due to many expenses, I didn’t buy. But then, one of my co-worker was selling his Linksys WRT54GC router. We had a deal that I will pay installment basis.

I setup the network. And it is a breeze. Setup the desktop to router first and configured the router. Then setup the notebook for the wireless connection. Was up and  running in an hour.

I only encountered two problems. First, there is no internet connection. Not because of wrong configuration, but because the base station (cell site) where I get my signal is down (due to power outage, no back-up generator?).  So I wasn’t really able to check if my internet was properly shared to the systems I have.

Second problem I encountered was a sharing problem. There is a shared folder on both systems. When I try to access the shared folder of the notebook from the desktop, no problem. But when I try to access the shared folder and the printer on the desktop from the notebook, I was asked for a login and password. I tried to figure out what was the cause of this problem. I shouldn’t be asked for a password since it is a ’shared’ folder.  Hopeless, three hours of trouble shooting, I prepare to go to sleep.

Out of nothing, I power cycled the router, and alas!, internet is back. So, I opened up Yahoo Messenger, looked if my tech friend was online, and he was, and asked questions about my situation. Here is the resolution (he is really an expert with computers). He told me to enable the simple print and file sharing. Then I remembered that I disabled that option in able to set permissions for some folders for users. So I enabled it and, boom, I can access the shared folder with no hustle.

I tried watching movies saved on the desktop from the notebook, it was fine. Printed test pages, it was fine.  Internet connection is fast.

Now, my only problem is, my father-in-law is the one using the wireless (primarily for printing), and I am wired. Plan to have a notebook (this is a dream, hehe).

Want to post some picts, but we will be relocating to our newly renovated house. i will be setting up that router properly (location wise) there. I’ll post the picts when that happens…

Hehe,, networking,, easy, but challenging…