Network Drive access

I am having difficulty access my network drive. I am able to access it from my office's wifi, but if I switch to our router or phone's internet connection it says it cannot find the network drive. Is the network drive name the same on any internet connection? Do I have to do anything special to be able to access this network drive from anywhere? I am pretty new at this.

If you are trying to do it from home. You would need to do it through a VPN connection, to connect to the work network.

Ok i think that applies to me. Let me go into a little more detail then tell me if I still need to VPN. There are two ways to connect to the internet in the building. through wifi and through ethernet cable. We currently rent an office then pay for 3 users on the wifi. So that we don't have to pay for another user we hooked a router to the cable and want to be able to access the network drive through there. Since it's still the office's internet should we be able to access the drive since we can access it on the wifi? We can access the internet fine on the router and we setup a static IP address for our printer as well. Now all we need is access to the network drive.

thomasgtsr said:

Ok i think that applies to me. Let me go into a little more detail then tell me if I still need to VPN. There are two ways to connect to the internet in the building. through wifi and through ethernet cable. We currently rent an office then pay for 3 users on the wifi. So that we don't have to pay for another user we hooked a router to the cable and want to be able to access the network drive through there. Since it's still the office's internet should we be able to access the drive since we can access it on the wifi? We can access the internet fine on the router and we setup a static IP address for our printer as well. Now all we need is access to the network drive.

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Since you are accessing these shares through the same office, same subnet etc. then there is no reason to set up a VPN in this case.

You would require the VPN if you were accessing the office shares from home for example.

You would first need to plug in the new router to a LAN switch or router's LAN port, you want LAN port to LAN port in this case. Don't use the WAN or Internet port on the new router. And of course you would need to disable DHCP on this new router so that it will eventually pick up an IP in the correct subnet from the gateway router.

You will need to do this when ever you add a new router or wireless A/P to an existing network in order to keep everything in the same subnet. It may take some time for the new router to pick up the IP from the gateway router. Might need to use WPS buttons etc.

Once the new router picks up an IP in the correct subnet you should then have access to the shared resources such as the office network drive. You can then access the new router by typing it's newly acquired IP into the URL of your browser.

I might point out that your shares most likely won't be secure from the office which you are borrowing the connection from unless you at least change the Workgroup name to something else on all those machines.

The question is where are the Network shares located on (someone's workstation, dedicated NAS, or on a Small Business Server). Are you sure that who ever setup the LAN & Wifi, made sure that everything can communicate properly on the LAN.

Who is your in house IT person? VPN would only be used if you are at home, or on the road, and need to access the work network.

It should not matter if you are on wired LAN or wifi. You should be able to connect to the network. Unless someone did not check the Ethernet jacks to make sure they are connected to the switch, which is connected to the router. If you are using IP phones in the office. It could be that Ethernet jack you connected to. Is setup only for the IP phones. That means that the switch that jack goes into is setup to isolate IP phones to the VoIP server. But can also pass through Network traffic, when you plug into the phone or jack.

I would get a hold of whoever setup your network, and have them fix the problem.