Networking Mac OSX 10.5 w/ Windows 7...
 

I just got this MacBook Pro running OSX 10.5 and I can't see any of the windows computers on my network. I've tried to ping them and have 100% packet loss. I'm trying to access my external HDD that is connected to my main PC.

Anyone have experience with this problem?

The ping timeouts suggest a larger networking issue.

Can you provide a brief description of your network setup?

EDIT -- Possibly stupid question: can you get online with the Macbook?

I have internet access through the Macbook. I can download and upload. I can access the router from the Macbook.

I have a desktop (main pc) running Windows 7 Ultimate 64. It's connected to the network via a netgear wireless nic. The externall HDD is connected directly to this PC via a usb connection, it is shared through the network.

I also have a notebook running Windows XP connected through a linksys wireless nic in the other room. It's only use is to serve as a print server which BOTH the desktop AND the MacBook are able to print too.

I just can't get access to the network via finder, ping or any other means that I've tried so far....

Can the print server ping your desktop?
Can the print server access your external hardrive?

Ping is unrelated to storage access. This is difficult to diagnose fully without knowing every detail about the network, but right now I'm seeing two possibilities:

1) Some kind of wonky routing issue. Assuming the router is handling your WAN connection, and given that the Macbook is able to access the printer, the most likely scenario in this vein is that the problem is actually a misconfiguration between your desktop and the router. The expected outcome of this is that the XP machine would be unable to access the network storage as well.

2) The more likely scenario is that your pings are being dropped for an unrelated reason, probably by your router due to filter rules being set too broadly in the firewall. If that's the case, than the problem is actually getting OSX's implementation of Samba configured properly. That you can see the printer suggests that it's working to some extent (printers and storage devices are both typically shared via SMB), but there's a problem regarding accessing the storage itself. It's probably permissions related, but as I have very limited Mac experience I can't offer specific advice on how to resolve that. Perhaps one of our Mac gurus will be able to guide you further in that regard.

Incidentally, if you want to free up your laptop, you could look into something like this to connect your printer to your network.

I just checked (never really had a reason to before now). The print server notebook CANNOT ping the desktop OR access the external HDD. I connected another external HDD to the notebook, configured it and shared it, but was unable to see it from the mac or the desktop...

So a very wierd update... I didn't change anything but my macbook just randomly started seeing the notebook and was able to access the shared documents folder on it...

That is odd.

Honestly, I'm at a bit of a loss on this one. It's very difficult to diagnose an issue like this remotely. Add to that the fact that I'm not really a Mac guy, and things get complicated.

It does sound like some sort of misconfiguration in the router -- perhaps it's handing out IP addresses improperly, or it's firewall is blocking the UDP packets used by SMB for discovery. The only other alternative I can think of is that there's some obscure Windows Networking error. The protocol isn't particularly robust, and can be broken by a number of relatively common setups that Microsoft apparently didn't account for. That doesn't account for the ping loss, but it's also possible that the unreturned pings aren't related.

Information I'd like now:

Each computer's IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway. In Windows you can find these under the Properties of the Network Connection (Accessible via Start>Settings). I don't know exactly where it is in Mac OSX, but there ought to be a similar method for obtaining it.