From: John Beckett 

Randall Parker

wrote in message news::
> These computers all plug into the same Netgear ProSafe VPN firewall. My
impression is
> that their local traffic won't go out on the internet.  Don't all the boxes
route
> their packets first to the hub's gateway address if they want to go out onto
the
> public internet?

I don't know what your VPN firewall is. If it's just a router with NAT and
some firewall, then you are pretty safe having computers talk to each other
while plugged into the router.

You are relying on the fact (which you should confirm) that each computer
has a private IP address (like 192.168.1.2), and that you have NOT set the
firewall to publish an internal IP address (that is, an external computer
cannot open a connection to one of your internal machines).

Of course you are also relying on the router not being rooted, and you hope
that you haven't run some malware, e.g. from an email, on one of your
internal computers.

> I also have a software firewall on the WinXP box. Do I need to lower that
firewall in
> order to do network neighborhood file sharing?  I see in the Windows Firewall
> settings in the Exceptions tab I have checked "File and Printers".

The XP+SP2 built-in Windows Firewall is pretty clever, but you should
carefully check all the buttons. In 'Change Windows Firewall Settings', on
the Exceptions tab, select 'File and Printer Sharing'. Click the Edit
button.

Here you see which protocols/ports and which scopes are enabled for 'File
and Printer Sharing'. You probably want scope = Subnet which would limit
connections to those where the other computer has an IP address on your
local subnet (for example 192.168.1.x).

> Also, if one wants to run SAMBA on a Linux box does that make the Linux box
show up
> in Network Neighborhood or do I have to find it in a different way?

I don't know much about samba, but I would not expect Linux computers to
appear in Network Neighborhood - to do so, the Linux computers would need
to periodically broadcast that they were acting as Windows file servers.

I think the simplest would be to put entries in the HOSTS file on the
Windows box, then use a shortcut to open a share on a Linux computer.

notepad %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Add entry like (linuxbox = name used on samba machine): 192.168.1.12    linuxbox

Shortcut target:  \\linuxbox

If your Windows computer is a member of a domain, it will have a
"primary DNS suffix". Say that suffix is "example.com".
In that case you would want:

192.168.1.12    linuxbox linuxbox.example.com

so either the short or the long computer name would work.

John

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