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I've maintained a closed home network in my home which comprises of-

  1. D-Link Router DSL-2750u [only LAN, not WAN]
  2. Windows XP PC
  3. iPad / Nexus 7 / Android Phones x 3 / Android TV

Also I made some folders in XP shared in network, installed ES File Explorer and similar apps in all devices in (3). So from any device of (3) I can just explore shared folders.

Everything was going okay until (1) gets malfunctioned and I purchased again D-Link DSL-2750u (new firmware) now XP is not showing up in any of devices in (3) while keeping everything else same as before.

As this being closed LAN I've no antivirus or firewall in XP. The only odd thing that I noticed in new system that NMAP scan (in XP) and also Fing (in devices (3)) never show ports 445 (microsoft-ds) & 139 (netbios) in services of new router while old router always showed them.

Also I checked in XP by netstat command to find ports 445 & 139 listening.

Being a physician by profession I've no deep knowledge of these things so I blindly tried port forwarding to 445 & 139, enabling DMZ, making computer's IP as static but nothing helped.

Can you please suggest me what to do to keep open ports 445 & 139?

Sathyajith Bhat
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Maria
  • 11

1 Answers1

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Since you are not using the WAN port of your router, meaning you are not using it to connect to a different network, you are in fact only using its switching functionalities. So any settings that are meant to impact the actual routing facility (such as port forwarding, DMZ etc.) will have absolutely no effect on your network.

If you are using both WLAN and LAN to connect to it, you need to make sure that a bridge exists. But unless you changed anything, this will be the standard case.

You are using a lot of different devices and I hardly believe that you have a static IP setup, so your devices need to get their IP address from a DHCP server.

Most likely, you used your router as a DHCP server before and the new one might not have this set automatically. Or you might have a mix of static IP's and dynamic ones that don't mix.

Therefore I suggest the following steps:

  1. Login to your router via the supplied software or on its home page. If that doesn't work, you know you have a misconfiguration in your network so immediately go to 3.
  2. Look for "DHCP Server" somewhere in the network configuration and make sure it's enabled.
  3. Make sure that all computers and devices get their IP address dynamically. This will sometimes be underlined with the term "DHCP".
  4. If you access your shared folders from other devices via IP address and not via name, then you might have to adapt to the new address.

Hope this helps.

vic
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