Ok, now you have me thinking. I don't have them on a network, XP netorking that is. I just have them on a 4 port router. I believe I have file and printer sharing enabled. So you are saying I need to create a workgroup on XP, one is XP home the other is XP Pro, do I need XP pro on both, and create a work group?
I just have them on a Lynksys 4 port router that's all. I plan on adding a dual wan router soon, but that shouldn't matter should it. Maybe because I don't have them in a work group or no use of XP networking?
Shreddog and C99, can you tell I don't have a background in computers? I used to sell VoIP telecom, but we always had sales engineers and IT support, guys like you too to get the nitty gritty done.
I think you need to put them all in the same workgroup. To do that I think you just need use the network setup wizard on each machine.
XP pro and XP home will work fine together. I have XP pro, home and win2k all together in one group. On XP pro you have to join a domain. So let's say you name it domain.com. XP home doesn't have domains, it has workgroups. So you need to name your workgroup domain. no .com. Kepp your workgroup name the same as whatever comes before the .com in the domain and it will work. I use the same user name and password across the different computers so I don't have to add user accounts- not sure here but if you use different user names and passwords you may need to add all the user names to each computer. Once you can see your new workgroup and computers from each computer's "view network coputers" screen you should be good.
Shreddog I sent you a PM. I installed the software for Synergy, after setting up a workgroup in XP, installed Synergy, but the client"failed to connect to server. Timed out." The same thing as last time. It must be some setting I have set wrong?
Let me state up-front I could be talking out my ass because I have never used this software (synergy) however I don't see how workgroups could be in any way related to your problems. This is cross-platform software, you can use different operating systems for the client and server: according to the FAQ "Yes. The synergy network protocol is platform neutral so synergy doesn't care what operating systems are running on the server and clients. " Thus there is no way that it can be using any Microsoft specific protocols (NetBIOS or SMB) or be tied to workgroups which is a Windows concept. The FAQ also mentions that you can use IP addresses instead of host names - you may want to do that to avoid any name resolution issues that you might have. If you don't know your IP address type IPCONFIG at the command line to see it. Might want to make sure that the two machines can "ping" each other as well.
Here some other tips that may help you with troubleshooting You can see what ports a given machine is listening (waiting to accept connections) with the command "netstat -a", the output is a little cryptic but based on my read of the documentation the server should be listening (by default) on port 24800 so you should see a line like this: TCP (hostname):24800 (hostname):0 LISTENING If you don't see a line like that then something is wrong. On the client side you can test basic connectivity on any tcp port using telnet, I use this all the time to eliminate potential application issues. From the client telnet to the server (say IP address 192.168.1.50) on port 24800: telnet 192.168.1.50 28400 If it seems to hang there then it has connected and you know the connectivity is good. If you get "Could not open connection to the host, on port 28400" then you have a connectivity issue, possibly a firewall related (could be either on the client or the server) Anyway, just general tips - hope they help.