Questions (and Answers) from our TechNet Event in Omaha! (Part 1 of 4)

What a young geek. Will he ever amount to anything?

Hello Omaha!   Thanks for being such gracious hosts, as always!  I love coming to town.  Sorry none of you took me up on the Karaoke Challenge out at Mic’s.  Maybe next time!  (Hey.. how about this next week? I’ll be at the Omaha HDC, and likely going out to Mic’s on Thursday again.)

I have a set of 5 questions that were asked during the TechNet Event; questions that lead me from responses of “I want to find more details for you”, all the way to “I have absolutely no idea.”    Ordinarily I’m okay posting questions and answers all in one blog post – but these are sufficiently interesting that they deserve their own posting.  So here’s the first one.  Watch for the others over the next 5 days.

Question 1:
(Actually two questions about a similar problem)
“I have a file Sharing problem. In a workgroup, peer-to-peer network, why can ‘t I see the other
Vista machines on my network? I want to do file sharing, or set up printer sharing, but I can’t find those machines. Yes, I have it file and printer sharing enabled on the workstations.”

“Can’t find my XP Shared Printer from Vista Machine – F/P sharing enabled, Can ping the vista from XP, but not the other way. And I don’t think it’s the firewall, because I already tried with the firewall off.”

I found a good set of troubleshooting steps in a TechNet Community Forum thread HERE.  Simple things such as having the same workgroup name on all machines, or firewalls getting in the way (and I know one of you already tried turning them off temporarily) might be the problem.  Other issues such as whether the LLTD (Link-Layer Topology Discovery) Responder is installed and working on XP can cause XP machines to not show up in the network diagram. 

Hopefully one of the troubleshooting steps will help you pinpoint the problem.

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EVENT ATTENDEES: Don’t forget that I’ve posted the resource links as well as the attached .zip file containing the PowerShell Demo Sample on my Resource Page HERE.