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I am going on vacation with my extended family and I am wanting show off my XBMC setup. Right now I have a NAS running windows XP and an HTPC running windows 7. The condo where we are staying doesn't have internet access. Is there a way to connect the HTPC to the NAS so that I can stream media?
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tman12
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You can do this with a crossover cable - look into instructions using the NAS you have.
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I call it a NAS because it is storage on my network, but it's a normal XP box.
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kricker
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You would still need a crossover cable to directly connect to PC's together. I'd take a small cheap router along with me to make it easier. I'm moving this thread to the appropriate place as it is not XBMC related.
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Yes, get a cheap router. Crossover connections are a pain.
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kricker
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2012-05-11, 22:08
(This post was last modified: 2012-05-11, 22:11 by kricker.)
I believe you will need a router to provide the DHCP information to the PCs. A switch is usually dumb and just passes the information through, the router determines where it goes. You may be able to assign static IP addresses to each PC and connect them with a switch, I've never tried that.
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You can also setup one of the machines to assign DHCP, but as kricker said, a switch should work fine if you setup static IPs.
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You don't even need crossover cables anymore. Any network cable will do with halfway modern hardware. Ethernet adaptors and switches have supported autosensing for some time, so they just detect that it's a machine to machine connection and one of the ethernet devices switches the lines electrically, thusly utalizing a straight cable as a crossover cable.
I actually do the inverse, the store had a stack of classic Xbox 'System Link' cables on sale for $0.79, they're just 25 foot crossover cables, I use them as straight cables to connect various hardware between the router or the switch.