Im trying to help a non-geek friend setup a home adhoc wireless net. As far as I can see we’ve got everything right. An adhoc network is set up with static IPs given to both, firewall has been disabled (temporarily), they’re on the same workgroup and they’re both connected to the adhoc network.
both computers cant ping each other. for some strange reason they cant even ping themselves (the firewall is off!).
The IP shows up as assigned when i do ipconfig though. and both computers can atleast access their own shared resources through IP.
Most probably their settings arent matching. Do they both have the same encryption and authentication settings? Is 802.1X on or off? In case of encryption, do they have same set of keys installed?
yes they do. plus if it were encryption or authentication issues, wouldnt they not be able to join the network to begin with?
we used win xp to make the wireless net, specified a key manually, use open network authentication and WEP based data encryption. im pretty sure the settings are the same on both computers for that.
why would a computer not ping itself? again i removed the firewall
Yes, they wont able to join the network if settings didn't match but how do you know that they have already joined? They cant ping and cant access shared resources.
And by Workgroup, do you mean the SSID? I went through the steps on WinXP that ask for an SSID and the last step asks to configure these setting on an AP. It seemed like an infrastructure set up to me, not an Ad hoc one. I could be wrong though.
The Ad hoc network shouldn't require an SSID and both the computers should recognize each other by their MAC addresses once the network has been joined. One of the two computers should already be sending out the beacons before the other one comes up, likes the beacons being transmitted and makes an ad hoc connection.
Cant say much about ping. Its odd that they cant ping themselves. Probably the interfaces are not set up up correctly on these machines.