2 Networked XP PC's - Internet problems

[superred]

I am trying to solve a problem for a friend who has networked 2 x Xp machines together and wishes to utilise ICS to share the internet between both of them.
As far as I understand the situation he is using DSL and has disabled the firewall on the host machine.
He has successfully networked them but when it comes to accessing the internet on the guest machine it requires the host's browser to run first before he has any success using the browser on the guest
Any ideas? totally out of solutions

Regards

Jason

 

[fenris]

How does the host machine access the dsl modem, is it PPPOE or DHCP? If is is PPPOE then there should be a client that logs onto the ISP's network. This may be the reason why the host machine has to connect first to the internet before the clients can access it. Also the PPPOE may time out and close the connection after a certain period of time the connection is inactive. For this I would look at getting some software that is designed to keep your connection alive. I had a similar setup except I was using linux as the router. It's PPPOE had a client to automatically esstablish a connection when a request was made by one of the clients. I haven't seen windows based PPPOE clients that had this capability.

If it is DHCP, I am not too sure about that one, sorry.

Anyway I would recommend one of the cable/dsl routers that are for sale. They are relatively inexpensive and very easy to setup. The bonus is that if you add more computers it is trivial to get the on the internet (LAN parties of Warcraft 3).

Here is a link to the router that I bought. I brought it home and in less then 10 minutes I was up and running with 3 computers.

http://www.dlink.com/products/broadband/di704p/

Good Luck.
Troy Williams E.I.T.
fenris@hotmail.com

 

[hchman]

Why not buy a router? They are cheap and work very well for sharing internet connections.