Networking 2 Macs with Crossover Cable

Hey gurus, how do you get two Macs to talk to each other? I am trying to get
my Macs networked, and I'm not having any success. I have a crossover
ethernet cable going between the 10/100 Base T ethernet ports on my G4 and
PowerCenter. I setup the G4 (running OS 9) for file sharing, made a user
account that gets full access, started AppleTalk on the ethernet port, and
started File Sharing. Then I tried starting AppleTalk on the PowerCenter for
the ethernet port and got some vague error message. That was in OS 8.1, and
I believe all of the necessary extensions were there (Ethernet extensions,
AppleTalk, OpenTransport). Then I booted the PowerCenter from a disk with OS
8.6 and tried to start AppleTalk on the ethernet port. That worked, but
indicated no zones present. I tried using AppleShare in the Chooser to get
to the G4's drives but nothing came up.

So if you don't mind, what am I missing here? How do "zones" work anyway?
How do I make the two talk to each other? (I thought we were talking plug
and play here!)