Righty..

My home machine is running winxp pro and Smartpass vpn client. when i try to connect to my work machine (win2k in a workgroup called CCS) it asks for authentication. problem is the username says MARMOSET/guest and is greyed out. but if i use me laptop which is win2k, i can connect without a problem and specify username and password.

So does anyone know what i need to change so i can access filesharing and computer management of the win2k machines?

thanks in advance

Control panel \ system \ remote tab \remote desktop tick the box to allow users to connect. That is if I have read your post right

You may also have XP's simple file sharing ENABLED. Disabling it will make it work properly (imho).

Workgroup-to-workgroup stuff like this isn't really recommended/supported very well anyway, you can try the IP address as well, that sometimes bypasses some of the weird behaviour.

Domains don't have this issue as it will just prompt you for the domain, user & pass.

I've got VPN setup from home using the standard Windows XP internet connection wizard. All our servers are Windows 2K based. The tirck we use is to never specify the domian on the machine you are going to connect from. You have to take this into account when accessing certain systems by typing DOMAIN-NAME\USERNAME in the username box but that's no real hardship.

If you can get the IP address from the client software you are using and know the connection username and password give it a try.

The problem i have, is because of the type of VPN gateway im using (smartpass) it resolves traffic sent to the domain to go over VPN. so the only way i can connect to my work machine is to use "pccg2.domain.co.uk"

I'm afraid I don't know the smartpass system.

I don't know if it will make a difference but you could try putting the IP address of the work system into your hosts file.

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc

edit hosts

Is the guest account enabled on the windows xp machine? This is a major problem i have on LAN's on workgroups, let alone VPN's. Also have you got the same user account existing on both machines in the computer management?

Sounds silly but the usual fix is to run the home and small office network configuration wizard in network neighbourhood.

Is the guest account enabled on the windows xp machine? This is a major problem i have on LAN's on workgroups' date=' let alone VPN's. Also have you got the same user account existing on both machines in the computer management?

Sounds silly but the usual fix is to run the home and small office network configuration wizard in network neighbourhood.[/quote']

Guest account is disabled on both machines.. and i have administrator credentials on both (tho as usual, XP handles them differently to 2k) i just dont understand why XP is doing this... 2k - 2k is fine!

I have got the same on xp-xp too, however only seems to do it cross service packs, so sp1 to sp2 can cause this... You're the administrator or logged on as someone who is administrator group?