I thought I knew a good deal about Windows networking. That is… until I was faced with Peer-to-peer networking in Windows 2000.
Mind you, I’m not a corporate administrator; I’m just a small-time office mechanic, with a few desktop PCs and a 12 port hub. There is no central server, save for the machine we use to share our cable internet connection (which is also my personal workstation).
Recently, we decided to switch the OS base from Windows 9X to Windows 2000. Everything went great, except for one thing: the machines refuse to share network resources! I can share out our internet connection with no problem; but whenever I try to share any folders or printers, I am refused a connection. Even more confusing, I am confronted with themessage: “You must supply a password to access the following resource: \\WIN2K_PC\IPC$” whenever I try to access a Windows 2000 machine directly. What the #&@!* is “IPC$”?
All of the help files in win2k suggest that sharing resources should be asstraight-forward as it was with Win9x and NT4. I can find no references to obligatory network passwords; nor is there anything to suggest that a simple peer-to-peer network should require a central server, internet router, or any other special hardware.
Ok, I can hear all of you seasoned network administrators laughing already… but could somebody PLEASE tell me what I am missing? This has been a most frustrating week.
