Two domains one laptop 1

[maximusimo]

Hi,

I have a laptop that I use at work and is a member of a domain. I have a wireless network at home. Am I still able to connect to my home one if it already is a member of a network, I am getting problems trying to go through the "Set up home or small office network" wizard within network connections. Any ideas?

 

[Righty]

You may be able to connect to the wireless network at home but to share files or use a printer on your home network you need to go and

Left click on My Computer
click on Properties
Click on Computer name tab
Click on the "Change" button and change the "member of" from your domain at work to your workgroup at home.

When you are going to use your laptop on the domain at work, just change it back using the same directions

 

[bcastner]

You need do nothing. In order to use files and printers on your home LAN simply browse for them; the quickest way is to simply directly point at the share or printer and make the connection a persistant one (using the reconnect at logon option). For example, using my Domain profile, I connect to a Home Workgroup share on Mom, sharename Common , by a Start, Run, \\mom\common and if I chose to I can make the connection persistent so that I do not have to take this step again.

The Workgroup name or Domain name has nothing to do with authentication to resources. It does make for fewer steps when using the Network Neighborhood browser. Even this step can be made to require fewer clicks if you name your Home network identicly to the name of your Domain at work, although this is not necessary.

Now here is why you should not change your system properties to your Workgroup at Home: unless you are a member at Work of the Domain Administrators Group, you will not be able to re-join the Domain wihout asking an Administrator to do this step for you. All of your Domain resources will be disconnected, including everything on your standard Domain profile, offline files, and many other odds and ends of your Domain profile.

What Microsoft recommends, and as well do I, is that you logon using your Domain account. This uses a feature of XP called cached credentials. Even in the absence of the Domain controller, you will be able to logon to your normal Domain profile.

If you use the offline file feature, your work related files can be made available when you are travelling or at home, and re-synchronized when you re-attach to your Domain network at Work.

Because you will be setup for a Domain, the file sharing model used for your XP Pro workstation will be one in which Force Guest and Simple File Sharing are disabled. All this means is that you should add your username and password to every machine on the Home LAN as a new local user. Similarly, take the one-time step of logging on to your laptop in local console mode as Administrator, and add as new users the username and passwords of other family LAN users if you want them to use a share on your machine -- although for security and safety reasons you might not want to create local shared resources on your Work notebook -- I would not personally.

Again, there is no reason to, and there are a lot of reasons not to, change the System properties to accomodate working between a Domain at work and a Workgroup LAN at home.

 

[Righty]

Thanks Bill. I always had to on my home network I could never print to my network printer on my home network if I were on my companies VPN. I will try what you suggest and hopefully this will be less of a hassle. Thanks

 

[bcastner]

Righty,

For VPN a lot depends on what you select as the default Gateway. If you leave the tunnel pointing at the LAN, you should be able to make the printer connection by browsing. Where it becomes tricky is if you do not use the default gateway so that you have access to the internet while on the VPN. In that case the Start, Run, \\printer_server\printer_sharename method has to be used.