My home perr-to-peer LAN has workgroup name LOCAL. PCs in it get their
IP addresses automatically from the DHCP server built into the ADSL
modem/router.

When I connect a friend's PC, again set to obtain an IP address
automatically, to the router, that PC also gets internet access via
the ADSL modem/router.

My question: If my friend's PC has workgroup MSHOME, is there any
possibility of his PC communicating with PCs in LOCAL. I am thinking
in particular of the case where he might have a virus or oher malware
infection.

tia
jd

"Jimmy Dean" <jdean@nowhere.now> wrote in message
news:s49gi1t5eigpsfg6p35rj9hg3hmcueva0n@4ax.com...

Whether or not your friend's computer can connect to the other computers in
your intranetwork depends solely on how you have setup networking on those
other computers. Did you enable file sharing in their LAN connectoid?

Some routers have firewalls (beyond just the fact that they have network
address translation) that let you define rules, such as which hosts, if any,
are allowed to communicate to each other or which are banned. I don't
recall seeing any cable/DSL modems, however, that had a decent firewall
(with rules that you could define to restrict intranetwork connections).

If you have software firewalls running on your hosts, you could always
configure them to NOT permit connections to them from anywhere except the
LAN-side IP address of your cable/DSL modem (since you need to use its DHCP
server to get your IP address and will need to go through it when going out
to the Internet).

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