I have a small home network with two computers running XP Pro.
Once upon a time when I first hooked up my network I had an old PC running 98 with only 48MBs Ram and a 100Mhtz processor. This was not a problem because it was only used for my kids to instant message their friends. Well I had it hooked up as thus: Two network cards in my main PC one of which was connected to the cable modem and the other connected to a hub where the old evil computer was hooked to. Well this worked fine for internet access, no prob. Well one day the old computer got infected by a virus from the new and beautiful computer because her evil owner wouldn’t let her practice safe computing and as such had no virus protection installed. Well while the new beautiful computer recovered and was soon gallivanting through the internet again, the old computer got very sick and was never able to play with his friends on the internet again.
So a year goes by and evil owner decides it’s time to bring a new PC into the house and boot the evil old PC to the trash bin. Well the new PC is nowhere as beautiful as number one PC, because of her faithfulness evil owner does not want to make her jealous. But new number two computer still has plenty going for it, plenty of computing power and lots of RAM.
Evil owner tries to hook the computers up in the original configuration (Cable modem to Nic 1, Nic2 to hub, Computer2 to hub) But no matter what was tried, including putting NetBeui on both PCs they could not talk to each other. The home networking wizard just laughed as he lied about connecting the two in unholy wedlock. Evil owner has had it. She curses the day she ever heard the name Bill Gates. In desperation she hooks cable modem to hub, Nic1 to hub and computer2 to hub. Computer 2 can now go play all day long on the internet. Computer 2 is destined to never talk to computer 1 however because they are on different subnets, supplied by even eviler cable company.
How can evil owner get these two computers to play together without spending more money? How can she use beautiful PC1 as her firewall when PC2 can only connect to Internet through the hub, where the internet connection now resides? Evil owner does not want to have to use the meager hard drive space on PC2 installing firewall software. She wants virus protection to be enough. How can we connect two computers together and still use cable modem so everyone can live happily ever after with out going broke?
Yes, while agree that is probaly the best solution, I am dead broke right now, and hate the idea of spending any money.I had the two Nics working on one time on my old computer, so why can’t I get it to work now on a better one?
That’s just it he doesn’t have a router, he is using a multiple NIC cards in one computer setup to access the cable modem with one NIC and attach to the home network with the other NIC and let the other PC work through his PC to access the net. The cable ISP tech tried to explain to me how to arrange this configuration when I orignally got cable (I have a small network of 3 PCs) and the process was such a convoluted PITA I ran out to get the router ASAP and haven’t looked back.
I had this exact setup in Windows98 (before moving to Linux). I had the cable modem going into one NIC, then the other NIC going into the hub. My wife’s laptop was then plugged into another port on the hub, and used a locally assigned IP address (192.168.x.x). Since you didn’t mention it, I’m gonna assume that you’re not using the Internet Connection Sharing available in Windows. It was fairly painless in 98 - to do it in XP, try this page:
(disclaimer: I haven’t used this information myself, since I don’t run XP. So I don’t know how complete/easy-to-use it is. And if you’ve already tried ICS, I’m not sure what to tell you.)
Make sure the network properties are right. Using TCP/IP the network card connected to the internet should probably be set to automatically get its IP address etc. from your ISP (that’s the way most ISP’s are set up). The other card in that machine should be set to a static IP of 192.168.0.1. On the second computer, make it’s network address also static, using 192.168.0.2. Make sure that the default gateway is 192.168.0.1 (this is how the second computer knows how to go through the first one to get to the internet).
Make sure the internet connection sharing check box is checked on the network card that connects to the internet.
Get ping working first. On machine #2 (the one without the internet connection) type “ping 192.168.0.1” at a dos prompt. If it doesn’t get an answer from machine #1 then it’s time to make sure you are using a crossover cable and no hub, or straight cables and a hub. On machine #1 you should also be able to type “ping 192.168.0.2” and get a response from machine #2. Ping works even if you have all of the microsoft file and print sharing screwd up, which is why you want to try it first. If you can successfully ping, then you know the network interfaces have the correct drivers installed and are configured correctly.
Go into network properties and make sure that “client for microsoft networks” and “microsoft file and print sharing” are both present. Add them if necessary.
Make sure each machine has at least one shared folder somewhere.
This should enable both machines to browse each other and also access the internet.
At some point you’ll want to make sure that each machine is password protected so that hackers can’t easily leave nasty files on your hard drives.
engineer_comp_geek has it exactly right, as far as the networking setup goes. You may be able to set up computer #1 (the one with the internet connection) to assign internal IPs using DHCP - but this would really only benefit you if someone uses a laptop and would possibly use it at another location also.
This is a stupid question, but where do you find the internet sharing check box? As soon as you tell me I’m sure my brain will kick in and remember.Also do I need a default gateway on the nic with a static ip? I did try stactic addresses 10.10.10.1 and 10.10.10.2 last night but I never added a default gateway on the non internet computer, maybe that was the problem.
One more quick question. For some reason I cant ping anything on my pc with the two nics, including the loopback address ,it hasn’t been able to ping anything for a while but I wasn’t worried because I was getting the internet and e-mail and such.I would think that a port was blocked except, I would think that has no bearing on the loopback.Of course I’ve been known to be wrong.