Wireless access to dialup--is it possible?

Factual Questions
1

We have a single PC in our house and we’re still on dialup. It’s a long story, but it works for us. The problem is that we occassionally need to connect using a laptop; it would be great if we could use a wireless connection so that we could use the laptop throughout the house. Is there any way to tie the laptop in to our dialup line, either through an external router or by connecting through the existing Win XP box?

2

Theoretically yes. You could set up the desktop as a router and a bridge. The wifi cards would be set to ad hoc/broadcast (talk between themselves) mode. You’d have to set up the desktop to bridge between the wifi card and modem.

I know this is possible, but don’t know exactly how to do it. I think you can do it with Windows connection sharing on Windows 98SE and later, and I’ve done something similar with wired connections and linux.

3

I’ve done just this with my mom’s PC. The trick is you need to configure the wireless router with the PC connected to one of the distribution connections of the router and so the PC gets its IP address from the external device. Once the wireless router is configured the PC needs tobe connected to the downlink port on the router that is normally used with a cable modem. In some hardware you may need a special crossover cable -usually has an orange jacket - but most newer 10 Base-T ethernet will automatically switch for this. Final step is to setup network sharing which gives the ethernet adapter a fixed IP address.

4

I believe there are such things as wireless routers that either contain analogue modems, or have a serial port that can be connected to a modem; you have to web into them initially to configure the dialup number, password, user ID etc.

5

The Airport Extreme base station has a built-in modem that automatically dials out when a user wants to connect to the Internet.

6

If the two machines are already networked(/able), then you can do it with no additional hardware; either by setting up Internet Connection Sharing (although I’m not sure how easy this is when one of the machines is Xp and the other isn’t), or by installing a proxy server program on the machine that has the dialup connection; Jana Server is pretty good for this (and free)

7

Thanks for the info, folks. I may need to bump this thread as I go along.