home intranet cant opent server

[bronach]

I am working on two windows seven machines in a home environment with no server or proper dns....when i had server 2003 installed i was able to use the domain to serve my test sites to both my machines with one install of xampp. now that i am running two wondows ultimate 7 machines i cannot get my laptop to connect to the xampp installed in the desktop.

I have adjusted the virtual hosts, hosts file and the listen ip address and ports, not sure what else to do to get my laptop to find the dektop xampp server!

[memilanuk]

Sounds like you've made a good stab at it so far...

A couple of quick questions, just in case its something simple:

1) Can you attach to the server via the localhost interface on that machine?

2) Any firewall software running on the server?

[bronach]

Thank you very much for your reply.....it turns out i found, with using mozilla, that the server actually times out....that made me think..."its trying to connect" so i disabled the windows firewall altogether and whala! it could open up the xampp main window from my laptop. so i reenabled the firewalla and enabled a rule in both incoming and outgoing to allow 80 and 443 ports...no issues there! thank you for your response.

Now moving on to the second issue....i can pull my localhost and xampp/index.php screen just fine but when i try to pull my website from a completely different diretory (i.e. NOT htdocs) i am getting an access forbidden error error 403...not sure why

here is what my vhost file looks like
NameVirtualHost 192.168.2.4:80

<VirtualHost localhost>
ServerAdmin myemail@yomama.net
DocumentRoot "c:/xampp/htdocs"
ServerName localhost
<Directory "c:/xampp/htdocs">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost horizonpt>
ServerAdmin myemail@yosisatamama.com
DocumentRoot "E:/My Web/horizonpt"
ServerName horizonpt
<Directory "E:/My Web/horizonpt">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

</VirtualHost>
anyideas?