Simple network problem

Hope someone can point me in the right direction.

Our home network consists of two PCs running XP Pro. We also have a network printer, all connected via a Linksys hub.

Connection to the internet is via an ADSL router, also connected to the hub.

Both PCs are correctly connecting to the internet, and all file sharing is active in both directions. Until yesterday the printer was also working correctly, but it is now only accessible via one of the two PCs.

If I disconnect our broadband connection and use local IPs rather than the 10.0.0.x that are assigned by the router both PCs can see the printer.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

well, you should be using local ip addresses with or without the router,
if your using valid internet addresses for the inside of your network, they will conflict that REAL ip addresses on the internet.

use 192.168.0.* addresses for your internal network.

Does that mean when you have IP addresses assigned by the router you're on a different subnet to the printer? If so, either change the IP address range that the router gives out, or change the IP address of the printer.

I don't know if this will help you.

It would be better to set all your ip address to static and stay withthe class C private which ranges from 192.168.1.1 - 192.168.1.254 and set your printer ip also to this range make sure your default sub net mask is 255.255.255.0 and on the printer properties on both the computers make sure the printer port shows the ip address of the print server or network printer and not the ip address of the other computer.

This should help i guess . It would help if you are behind a router cause all local ip's are hidden from the WAN side if you don't have a router and are trying to setup a network than when your ISP assings and ip address to your computers you will have a problem as the default sub net masks changes.

Thanks for the replies. Eventually all I did was -

Start one of the PCs and the printer without the router active.

Log on to the printer and fix its IP to be in the default range of the router (10.0.0.x) on the routers subnet (255.0.0.0) and point it at the routers gateway.

Then, close everything down, reattach the router and everything works .......

Quite why it stopped I don't know, but at least it's going.

Another thing it showed me is that my home network connection has three active items -

LAN, 1394 connection ,and Network Bridge.

I've now closed both the bridge and the 1394 and everything still works. Any idea why they would have been started by home networking?

If you've got an ethernet and 1394 connection, then by default when you run the networking wizard, it groups both of these together into a bridge for you. If you don't want it to do this, you have to go for the option to manually choose network connections for the network.