A misadventure with firewalls

There’s always been a problem for PCs in my home network to access files on my laptop. I could access shared folders on the others, but never the other way round.

My laptop is connected to a wireless access point, while the rest of the PCs are on a wired LAN. I had even turned off Windows firewall, and still couldn’t ping my laptop from other PCs. I double checked McAfee’s firewall rules, where I had ticked “trust all computers on the LAN”.

For the better part of the last two years, I thought that the wireless access point was faulty. But no amount of Googling turned up anything.

Exasperated, I fineally decided to give Network Magic a try. In less than half an hour, it had not only pointed out that McAfee’s firewall was the culprit, but detailed exactly how to navigate the treacherous menus to fix the problem. It was non-trivial.

Configure >
  Internet & Network >
   Advanced ... >
     Trusted and Banned IPs ... >
        Apply a tick against checkboxes for the IP addresses which are trusted.

This level of menu maze madness is beyond insane, especially given the pretty network diagram showed all the PCs, but did not warn that these PCs have been firewalled. In contrast, Network Magic did it just right.

The moral? Don’t ever think one is so smart that one of those htmlMickey Mouse-looking software can’t help you. It just might be the right medicine.