connecting a Mac and a PC with ethernet cable

I was trying to directly connect a Macbook and a PC with a standard ethernet cable.. without a router.
Set the IP ad subnet mask on the PC to

192.168.1.1
255.255.255.0

and on the Mac
192.168.1.2
255.255.255.0

all basic stuff.

I was able to ping the Mac from the PC, however not the other way round

So when I tried to "connect to a server" from the Mac, it didn't work.

Am I doing something wrong here ?
I was connected like this before and it was working... not sure what's going on.

 

ah, good point. I remember something like this from my networking classes too lol.

The funny thing is, I already had it working couple months back.

I have now tried the same cable as before and still no luck.

I was able to get a ping both ways, but then I realized I had the wifi turned on as well on the Mac.. and I was pinging the network router, which had also the 192.168.1.1 IP..