sharing wireless connection...

[Dr. Kramer]

Ok, so my laptop is capable of receiving and using a wireless signal that I am sharing with my neighbor. But I want to hook my desktop up thru my laptop wireless connection. The 2 are connected via a Linksys BEFSR41 wired router. I've tried to bridge the wireless and wired connections on my laptop, but when I do that, I can't connect to the WLAN. I've tried all combo's with the bridge, but can't get anything to work. ANy help would be appreciated..

DK

 

[Reverend Jasen]

Bridging is not what you want to do. That combines 2 connections to the same LAN into one. Not 2 connections from different LAN's.

First, you need to setup ICS on the laptop to share out the wireless connection.
rightclick "network places">"properties", rightclick "wireless connection">"properties", "Advanced">"share this connection" (or however they word it) Then walk through the quick wizard. This basically turns your laptop into a router, making the wireless connection the WAN side, and the ethernet connection the LAN side.

Now, to get this to work right, you'll have to turn off DHCP on your router, so that the desktop is getting it's IP/mask/gateway/etc from the laptop's ICS, otherwise the 2 are fighting each other to give away IP's.
It *might* work if you plug the cable from your laptop into the router's WAN port, and leave the router's DHCP enabled. I haven't tried that, but in theory it should work. Of course, then you'd have some weird double NAT thing going on and that could possibly mess with some of your programs. No, actually that would be a triple NAT, if you count the originating wireless AP. Confusing, isn't it?

 

[muzikool]

Nice reply, RJ... and welcome to OSNN!

 

[Nick]

Could you provide some more info on your network setup?

At the moment it's not clear wether you need a bridge or need ICS, but it sounds like a bridge will do what you want, as it is designed to connect two network segments together, where as ICS is designed to perform NAT on a WAN connection. You might be able to get it to work using ICS, but your best sticking to the right tool for the job to avoid unnecissarily complicated network setups if you have to change anything later on.

 

[wind3D]

Hmm, I'm still a noob at networking, but now that the time seems right...is it possible to combine 2 DSL connections from two seperate lines into one connectioon? Say you've got two lans, can you connect both of those lans to one single computer?

 

[mooo]

wind3d you can get a dual wan router.. i think that is the only way though.


Well while on this subject, I have 2 cable modems at my house, 1 is connected to a router that everyone uses except me, and i have my own. Is it possible to add a wireless network card and jump onto that network and notmess up my current connection to my modem??

 

[Nick]

To use two ADSL connection's as one you need a load balancing router.

As for the questions about 2 networks into one computer, this is a little bit tricky, but shouldn't cause too much of a problem. Once you've got the 2 network cards set up (wireless or wired, doesn't make a big difference to tcp/ip) you need to configure your computer which connection it needs to use to access different networks, like the internet for example. You do this by using the route command from the command prompt to set up which gateways to route traffic through according to the rules you define. More information on the route command here. The instruction's are for Windows XP, but haven't changed much since NT.

If you do have two network connection's set up and have access to the internet on both of them, you want to set up route's to the internet on both of them, but give the one you'll use most a lower metric. This means that you'll use your primary connection as long as it's running, and if it goes down your computer will just failover and route the connection over your other connection.

Hope this helps

 

[wind3D]

Nick: Kudods for the great info. Thanks.