bridge/router/gateway

[MechCD]

My garage has been picked for a lan party. the garage is fine and dandy, except there is no internet out there. I have a nice LAN inside with a wireless access point and a laptop with both a wireless and wired NIC.

I need to use the laptop as a gateway (I think) from the wireless side to the garage lan. I'm completely lost on what to do. I installed the WinGate 6 beta, and all it did was break any sort of connection I had.

Heres a rundown

Cable modem -> router->switch 1 ->switch 2, comps, AP

Switch 1 has a few comps and the access point
switch 2 has the server and basment comps

I need something like this

cable modem ->router->switch 1-> AP -> laptop ->switch 3 -> garage comps

I did manage to get it all physically wired that way, but the laptop needs to do something for this to work.

A 500+ foot CAT5 cable would work wonderfully also LOL

EDIT: laptop is running WinME. Win2k server is available for it, but i' rather not run it for a single days use.

[Bruce]

According to Microsoft, WinME can support Internet Connection Sharing. I tried it back in the early days of WinME and had trouble, so I'm not comfortable recommending it, but it is one possibility. The wireless side needs to connect to the internet normally and the NIC needs to be configured to share the connection for the switch.

They use a strange set of IP addresses and they assume that every downstream client will be configured by the wizard using a floppy. That's a pretty poor way to assign addresses to the machines in the garage. Current machines assume they can find a DNS host but ICS doesn't do it that way.

There are some 3rd party proxy servers that will do the job, and you can probably run one or two of them on WinME.

I hope you're not planning the party for this weekend.

[Bruce]

Suppose you move the router to the garage - - or borrow one from somewhere.

Modem -> AP -> laptop -> router -> switch.
- - or - -
Modem -> router -> AP -> laptop -> router2 -> switch.

With choice 1, your laptop has no firewall so it'll be exposed to hackers unless you run somehting like ZoneAlarm.

With option 2, the laptop connects like you usually do and ICS would only need to work with a single connection: the outbound side of the router. Everybody in the garage would see the router and connect normally.

[pelligrini]

Do all all the people coming over have wireless connections? From your first idea it looks like you'll have a switch for wired connections.

Is everyone going to be connecting to the internet at once? If so, it will be slow.

If it were me I'd just run a long cable from the switch hooked up to the router into the garage. At the end of that cable I'd uplink another switch and plug in the AP to that garage switch too. Don't have to mess with any ICS or other BS software.

[MechCD]

I tired ICS and it messed things up royally. It wants to do things backwards. it assumes I have a cable modem on the wired NIC and I want to share across the wireless. It also can't comprehend that the cable modem is behind a router.

Everybody is going to use wired cards. We all won't be going on at the same time, its just for random updates and stuff.

Bruce, I'm not sure how your 2nd setup would work.

Any software solution would work too. :baa: If I knew how to use WinGate, I think it does what I need. I'm finding that not being directly connected to th modem is whats holding me up.

Sooo.. for ICS or Wingate..... I should leave the wireless network stuff alone so that it connects to the LAN and whatnot.... but the wired laptop side should have a static IP... I think........ ICS is a pain and so is WinGate :hic:

[pelligrini]

Have you ever tried Analog X's proxy?
http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/proxy.htm

I used to use it at the office sharing a dialup connection between 8 machines.

[MechCD]

Have you ever tried Analog X's proxy?
http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/proxy.htm

I used to use it at the office sharing a dialup connection between 8 machines.

:baa: :baa: I just downloaded the same thing :baa: :baa: :baa:

I got WinGate's proxy going as the download was finishing.

It's all working with a proxy. I don't see anything that wouldnt work with a proxy or can't be downloaded separate. We're going to have a file dump location so once an update for a game has been downloaded, everyone can get it. Thanks for the help!

[Bruce]

I tired ICS and it messed things up royally. It wants to do things backwards. it assumes I have a cable modem on the wired NIC and I want to share across the wireless. It also can't comprehend that the cable modem is behind a router.

I never said ICS was a good idea. I do know that if you have two NICs, there's a point in the configuration that asks you which one is which.

Bruce, I'm not sure how your 2nd setup would work.Assuming you've got the laptop configured so that it can see the internet over the wireless and it shares it over the wired NIC, the router2 in the garage would give everybody an automatic IP address assignment and they would all see the router as their next-upstream-neighbor. The Router2 would see the laptop in the same way it would see the cable modem.

Sooo.. for ICS or Wingate..... I should leave the wireless network stuff alone so that it connects to the LAN and whatnot.... but the wired laptop side should have a static IP... I think........ ICS is a pain and so is WinGate :hic:

If you can get a long cable from the garage to the house, it's going to be easier than using the laptop and the wireless connection (and significantly simpler). I'd bet that wingate is more straightforward than ICS, but they're both fairly complicated.