Yet another connection-sharing question
Chippy
I'd be grateful if someone could try to point out where I appear to have gone
braindead.
NTL finally started offering cablemodems in my area recently and I got switched
on to their network yesterday. It's working fine but I also want to get the
rest of my small home network to use the line.
Old setup was: machines connected to a small 8-port hub, gateway machine was
a very aged P100 laptop running linux & IP masquerading, one PCMCIA card was
a network adapter the other a modem, and I've been happily using that and
dial-on-demand services to connect all the other boxes to the internet.
The new setup has the shiny new Athlon box connnected to the cablemodem via
one NIC (a NETGEAR FA311) and connected to the internal network via a second
one (Realtek RTL8139B). The box is running 98SE so I thought I'd use what
Microsoft so thoughtfully provided and set up the Internet Connection Sharing
service. I followed the instructions, changed the IP address of the default
gateway on my other machines to point to the cablemodem box, but I cannot get
the internet connection to be shared.
I *can*:
- connect to the internet via the cablemodem from the directly-connected
machine
- ping any machine on the internal network from any other machine, so I know
that it's set up OK
At first I thought maybe internet connection sharing itself was broken (as if
microsoft would ever provide broken software!) so I tried downloading a couple
of other proxy/gateway servers. None of them worked, and I was beginning to
think that maybe NTL have something that somehow detects & blocks a shared
connection, when in desperation I turned to usenet (!) and saw that many of
you out there were claiming success.
If anyone has any ideas at all I'd be extremely grateful, I've been setting up
and running small networks for various people for years now and nothing's ever
got me as stumped as this. All hardware & software configurations seem to be
correct, but the little packets are plain refusing to go where they're supposed
to!
Cheers
Chip
Chippy
OK so I'm following up my own message but here's a couple of extra snippets of
information which might be of help:
Firstly I'm an ex-C&W customer so I'm using the cablemodem in my Pace set-top
digibox.
Secondly, and possibly more importantly, I downloaded a trial version of
Wingate Lite to see if that would be able to proxy my network's connections.
Upon running it told me that the Realtek RTL8139b was a "Buggy adapter"
(Wingate's own words) and it disabled it. Completely. As this is the NIC that
connects my PC to the set-top box I suddenly had no net access at all. I couldn't
find any further information about exactly what Wingate considered "buggy"
with that NIC, but I think tomorrow I'll be buying something else and seeing
if it makes any difference.
Chip