Anyone familiar with Win/XP Home's way of sharing internet?
Yesteday I blew up my main WiFi router (Buffalo Airstation). Was moving it when reconnected started getting flashing red diagnostic light (deceased).
I just happened to have a spare SMC Barricade WiFi+router & have been trying to get it operational but for reasons I still have to explore, can get the SMC to do everything but relay the other computers onto the net.
To get around the problem of why the SMC was not routing my other computers thru my adsl modem, I took my multi media computer (it has WinXP Home on it), added a 2nd lan card, connected the 1st lan to ADSL modem, then connected the 2nd lan card to a hub to which all the other computers were connected.
I set *all* the lan cards to use DHCP. Then on the multi media computer (which I was now about to set up as a router for all the other computers) I selected the #1 network connection & advanced properties & requested that 'this computer' be configured to share internet access with others.
This worked exactly as planned but what kind of threw me is how it works !!!
To recap
1) Adsl modem connects to the net - the lan side of this uses 192.168.0.1 as ip
2) Multimedia computer with two lan cards, #1 using DHCP connects to adsl modem
#2 set for dhcp connects to hub & thus all other computers all set for dhcp
After I requested the change to #1 network connection to share, WinXP went into the settings for lan #2 on multimedia computer & changed the tcp/ip setting to manual & set its ip address to 192.168.0.1 !!! - but it all works ok.
My question is, does anyone know why WinXP does this & why does it work ?
I have seen this happen twice now in similar network setups, where WinXP home changes the config of a 2nd lan tcp/ip, on a computer being set up as a router, to the same ip as the lan port on the modem.
My 1st reaction is how can two lan network devices be allocated the same ip address ?
Am guessing that MS does some odd massaging internally.
Despite the oddity, as mentioned already, it all works & all computers including the MM one can access the Internet thru the adsl modem.
Doug Marker