Home networking odyssey: From the frying pan to the freezer

By Mike Azzara

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Chapter 8

Sept. 8: I finally got the Gateway upstairs. I configured it exactly the same way I did the Compaq and the laptop, and I still couldn't get it to connect with those other XP machines. It should have worked, but it didn't.

And, oh yeah, the Gateway refused to recognize the WD 320-gig drive I had attached to it, which was storing my daughter's iTunes songs. The drive made an awful clicking sound, so I connected it to my laptop, which seems to recognize it. It even showed up in the Device Manager as WD External USB drive. But there seemed to be no way to access it. I couldn't get to it. I heard somewhere that someone had put a damaged drive in the freezer for five hours, and then it worked for 20 minutes. I pondered doing the same. (Needless to say, I was going insane!)

Sept. 10: Well, it turns out there were two network adapters on the Gateway, according to, er, the Gateway. One was a Broadcom, the other a Linksys LNX100TX, or something like that (although I could only find one Ethernet receptacle on the back panel). So I had plugged the wrong physical address for the Gateway into Norton on the Compaq and the laptop. Once I adjusted (by having Norton "trust" the physical address for the Gateway's Linksys adapter), the Gateway was able to access the shared folder on my laptop (once I logged in with user name and password). In addition, it successfully printed to the HP psc2510 attached to the laptop, and it also opened the shared folder on the Compaq. But the damn laptop and Compaq couldn't see the Gateway! When I typed "\\gateway" I got an error message that said, "Login Failure: the user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer." Something was still amiss.

(Note: I have never solved this puzzle, but I think I figured out the problem. The Gateway has two separate user accounts, Dad and Kids. Neither account has a password; you just choose one or the other when you boot up. I'm convinced this multiple account setup prevents the other computers from seeing the Gateway, when the Gateway can see them just fine. Even though the laptop requires a login, there is only one account. I tried creating a new account on the Gateway, with a password, to log into, but that hasn’t worked. Since I no longer need multiple accounts on the Gateway, I plan to eliminate all the extra accounts when I get a chance and see if that helps. No amount of Google searching--and I have done many hours’ worth--has yielded the answer.)