Network Mac and PC

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bryanfilm

Registered
This is my first post at this site. I have looked fairly extensively through the posts to try to find a solution to my problem but have not been succesful. Here is my problem:

I have a Mac running OS X 10.2 and a laptop running windows xp both the mac and the pc are running through a ethernet Hub that connects to my ADSL Ethernet Modem. They both connect to the internet fine. My problem is that I want to be able to connect to my pc and visa versa with the mac. I do know that the ip addresses for both computers change frequently (i guess they are dynamic ip addresses assigned by my isp?) If I try to ping my mac from windows xp it works. But if I try to ping the pc from osx it doesn't find my pc with the ip currently assigned. However if I assign a manual ip address it will ping it. My problem is how to connect each system and what settings should I be using on the pc side and mac side so that I can share my files with the set up that I currently have?
 
OK, so your PC can ping your Mac, which means that if you turn on Windows file sharing and/or FTP access in the Mac's Sharing preferences pane, the PC should have no trouble seeing it. You can turn on printer sharing too, though your PC will need to have a Windows component called "Unix print services" (installed through the network control panel I believe) in order for your PC to use the Mac's printer.

Now, if you can still work on the Internet with the PC having a manual IP, and can thus ping it, then there's no reason why the Mac shouldn't be able to connect to it o browse files and so on.
 
If I change my the pc ip address then I won't be able to access the Internet with my PC. I want access on both. Is there any way around this?
 
It'd be easier to answer if you post the IP addresses and subnet masks. Then we can tell more about why they're not able to talk to each other correctly.

The other thing you could investigate is whether the DSL modem has the capability to act as a NAT router. If that were the case, you could have a single IP address dynamically assigned to the router, and use static private addresses for your machines (the router does the translation when accessing the Internet). But you'd need help from your ISP to get all that setup.

Wade
 
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