Question : Password prompt to map a drive on a different subnet.

Network consisting of WinXP (Home and Pro), Win98 and Mac computers all connected thru a WatchGuard SOHO 6 Wireless Router. All computers that connect via a wired connection to the router can browse the web, share files & printers just fine.

My notebook (WinXP Pro) connecting thru the wireless can browse the internet, view a web page on an internal web server by putting that server's ip address in the address bar of Internet Explorer. Listen to audio streamed across the network by putting the ip address of the computer running Windows Media Encoder in Media Player. I can ping all of the other computers. What I can't do is map a drive to a shared folder on a WinXP computer on the other subnet.

What I want to do is access music files on a shared drive on a computer running WinXP Home. When I try to map the drive from 'My Computer' as '\\192.168.1.10\music\'  I'm prompted for a username and password and the known username and passwords for that computer are not accepted. I tried mapping to a Win98 computer also on the other subnet and it worked just fine without being prompted to login.

The router configuration requires that the Trusted (wired) and Optional (wireless) networks be on seperate subnets, so they are configured as 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0 and 192.168.2.1/255.255.255.0. There is a checkbox on the Optional Network Configuration page to "Allow traffic between Optional Network and Trusted Network" which is checked. Prior to checking this I wasn't able to ping computers on the other subnet.

Scot

Answer : Password prompt to map a drive on a different subnet.

Ok I think I've got it.  The failed trace shows that the socket connections to SMB and Netbios-SSN do arrive at the wired XP machine but are never responded to.  This packet is identical to the initial socket connect to Windows 98 so it doesn't seem to be the router messing with the packets.  The XP box getting the packet and failing to respond means that the XP box itself is dropping the packet.  This usually means Windows firewall.

So, I checked my Windows firewall default settings for file and print sharing and saw that only machines from the local subnet were allowed to access file shares.  I'll bet yours is set the same way.  To check this (from the wired XP box):

- Launch control panel, windows firewall
- Click Exceptions
- Highlight File and Printer Sharing and click Edit
- Click Change Scope.  Here you can specify which machines have access

This is done by port so you need to change this on 139 and 445.  Alternatively you can just uncheck file and printer sharing on the exceptions page.