Can you network a Windows 95 and a Windows 2000 computer together?

[Creole]

We just got dsl in the office. The modem is also a four port router. The two Windows 2000 computers are connected to teh internet as well as the hard drives. Is it possible to network a windows 2000 and windows 95 computer together? If so, then how?

[CaptNKILL]

You will probably need to make some sort of Network Setup Disk from the 2000 machine to install on the 95 machine so they can connect.... I dont know if 2000 does the network disk thing, but XP does.

[Son Goku]

Yes, 2 boxes don't have to use the same operating system (or the same version of it) to communicate with each other. When you go on the web, the box holding the web server could be running almost anything from Linux, to some other variant of UNIX, to Solaris, to BeOS, to NT/2k/XP. This could be running on a PC, an IBM RS6000, a Sun SPARC, DEC Alpha, SGI MIPPs (with IRIX for instance), to almost anything.

You're browser, sitting on your win2k/x86 box doesn't care what the web server is. As long as the server can communicate with the browser (in this case via HTTP and using HTML, they don't care what the other is running on.

I don't know how those 4 ports are setup...aka is it a hybrid between a 3 port hub on one side of the router, and a DSL port on the other, are these 4 seperate routes out of the box, etc...

But basically, your DSL side needs to be configured however the ISP indicated to connect to their servers.

On the other side of the router you're dealing with private IP addresses, and using NAT. It would make life easier to configure both Windows boxes on the same network...depending on your device, you might want a hub, or a hub might be built in. From your description, I don't know what your equipment is that well. Also the configuration can depend on who's router you're using, and what IOS is loaded in there.

On the private side, you can use anything, but convention is to use a private, non-routable address. For your uses a class C (254 possible devices) is sufficient as you'd only need a bare minimum of 3 IP addresses.

So in your case you could use, somewhat arbitrary here, but lets say 192.168.135.0 network with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. This will give you more IPs then you need, but more explenation would be necessary to describe the basics of subnetting. In this case, you can assign the first available IP to the router such as 192.168.135.1 which then becomes the gateway to each PC. The other IPs to 192.168.135.254 are available (192.168.135.255 is the broadcast address so don't attempt to use that), and just assign 2 different one's to each PC. Of course the DNS should be set to whatever the ISP or company provides for domain resolution.

This will get the PCs out. To get the PCs to talk to each other, you can either, easier way use Microsoft networking and Network neighborhood, or you can setup a server on the 2k box for different things. The earlier would be easier if you haven't administered networks before.

I know this worked between Windows 98 and Windows 2000 several years ago. Windows 95 should be no different. Best to avoid using an NT domain (aka requiring the NT box to authenticate before the 95 box can log in to share resources). That's just giving yourself more to setup here.

[Gator]

Originally posted by Creole
We just got dsl in the office. The modem is also a four port router. The two Windows 2000 computers are connected to teh internet as well as the hard drives. Is it possible to network a windows 2000 and windows 95 computer together? If so, then how?

My network has 3 x WinXP, Win2k, WinMe, and 2 x Win95 machines. It's very easy, just get a switcher and set them all up for Microsoft Network client, File Sharing enabled, and sometimes Netbeui protocal helps too. Switchers start around $30us or less.

Originally posted by CaptNKILL
You will probably need to make some sort of Network Setup Disk from the 2000 machine to install on the 95 machine so they can connect.... I dont know if 2000 does the network disk thing, but XP does.

no, you don't need that disk, the switcher will do all the work for you