I would not have thought to look for firewall settings on the Win98 box itself, and I don't know of that feature being included in Win98, but I'll check a) just in case there's a detail I'd overlooked about that particular flavour of Windows, and b) in case there's already third-party personal-firewall software on it. (This is a hand-me-down just recieved by my new housemate/tenant who just finished moving in. More on that in a separate LJ entry when I get around to it.)
I don't have a crossover cable -- I should go look it up and make one just to have on hand, I guess -- but there are a whole bunch of other machines on the same hub. I set the new computer to pinging a couple of other machines, then went to my room and fired off a few Xterms and ran tcpdump from three or four machines at once to compare views, and set up pings the other direction while I was at it. That's what I was looking at when he plugged in a laptop he brought home from work (Windows also, though I'm not sure which version) and the expected traffic suddenly started showing up on my screen ... so it's not the cable and doesn't seem to be any of my machines causing the problem, but it's still mysterious.
I did think of plugging that machine and a few others into a smaller, less intelligent hub for testing. (Haven't done that yet. It's on the list of things to try.)
I could build a bridge, if I use a boot-from-CD distro of Linux in it or can cram enough of the smallish hard drives I've got into one box, but the only computer in the house that already has two Ethernet cards is the one acting as firewall/masquerading-router to talk to the antenna on the roof. The possibility of building a bridge is not ruled out, though I'd hoped to use some of the parts elsewise.
(no subject)
I don't have a crossover cable -- I should go look it up and make one just to have on hand, I guess -- but there are a whole bunch of other machines on the same hub. I set the new computer to pinging a couple of other machines, then went to my room and fired off a few Xterms and ran tcpdump from three or four machines at once to compare views, and set up pings the other direction while I was at it. That's what I was looking at when he plugged in a laptop he brought home from work (Windows also, though I'm not sure which version) and the expected traffic suddenly started showing up on my screen ... so it's not the cable and doesn't seem to be any of my machines causing the problem, but it's still mysterious.
I did think of plugging that machine and a few others into a smaller, less intelligent hub for testing. (Haven't done that yet. It's on the list of things to try.)
I could build a bridge, if I use a boot-from-CD distro of Linux in it or can cram enough of the smallish hard drives I've got into one box, but the only computer in the house that already has two Ethernet cards is the one acting as firewall/masquerading-router to talk to the antenna on the roof. The possibility of building a bridge is not ruled out, though I'd hoped to use some of the parts elsewise.