I diagnose a faulty DVD drive for a customer.

When I go back to install the drive, he also asks me to see if I can setup the laptop to print remotely to the printer connected to his desktop system.

I had previously setup the laptop, so it can connect to the internet, so I know that the network connection is fine.

I start by sharing the printer. The systems can ping each other (only the IP addresses, not the network names), but the windows networking doesn’t want to play ball. The desktop system has a “my network places” icon but within that, there is just a “MSN” logo… Odd… looks like something is amiss with the registry. Since I know the networking to the internet is working, I don’t want to muck around with finding a registry cure at this stage.

The laptop is new, so its networking setup looks normal.

I try disabling norton IS on both systems, & I can now setup the shared printer on the laptop… I complete the setup (after finding the printer install CD).

Of course, the printer stops working once the systems are restarted (Norton is blocking the traffic somewhere).

I cannot see how norton I.S. could be sold to average people (or worse, be bundled with most laptops sold to people)… there must be a lot of people out there who run their computers & home networks in a very limited fashion, thanks to norton crippling the network & the difficult to use and understand user interface.

Of course not having any security in place is worse, but norton I.S. needs to be more intelligent… to know what is legit local traffic & what isn’t

Anyway, the solution is buried in the N.I.S. firewall, I need to make a change to the advanced settings, in order to allow printer traffic.

An awkward solution, but it works.