networking w 2NICs on a laptop

[dnsherman]

help.. i have 2 nics on w98 laptop... ethernet and wireless adapters. both are installed ok, and are using dhcp and the same default gateway, and appear otherwise in the device table ok. in the ethernet operation i get connectivity to the router (and then to the internet). when in wireless mode (when the ethernet cable not connected), the wireless card gets good signal and connectivity to the WAP, but no packets are sent to the router. it appears that w98 is still trying to send packets over the ethernet adapter. what am i missing about having w98 send packets to the correct network adapter? i searched the forum for leads on this topic but couldn't find any. many thanks in advance! dns

 

[jrbarnett]

Hi,

I had a similar issue on a 98SE box with 2 NICs. I solved the problem by removing the unused NIC. Basically it has everything to do with the fact that 98 doesn't like a NIC with no cable attached (or wireless with no signal).

John

 

[dnsherman]

i found some useful info at another posting. it appears that the NICs do not always release their prior settings, namely the DHCP info. If they do there is no problem as the network start up will ensure that they are "renewed" - so that if there is no DHCP as when the ethernet cable is removed, the DHCP fails and the OS will go to the next card in its sequence to get on the network.
what I came up with (with help from microsoft at their newsgroups) for this case. In the autoexec.bat, put commands to "release" and "renew".
winipcfg /release_all
winipcfg /renew_all
the boot-up is a little slower as the DHCP time out can be long, but it gets both NICs initiated correctly.
i'd be interested in comments if others have used this approach and/or comments on this. thanks!