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Internet Connection Sharing in Windows XP
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There are situations when broadband internet is not an option. For example there are remote locations where high-speed is not available. Also there are cases when dial-up is required for security reasons. When it comes to dial-up we encounter difficulties if we need to get connected more than one computer to the same internet connection. That's why Windows XP has a very nice feature called Internet Connection Sharing or ICS.
Let's take the example of a company that has three computers and the only way to access the internet is through a dial-up connection. There are two ways to get access to the internet:
1. Dial-up only. In this case we would have each of the three computers connected to the phone line and they will conflict with each other every time they access the internet at the same time. We could buy three separate phone lines for each of them but that can be costly especially every time when we want to add a new computer to the network and also this solution would lack the benefits of networking and file and printer sharing.
2. ICS. We can connect all the computers together through a switch or router. One of the computers in the network will be the gateway and the rest will get the internet from this computer as you can also see in the diagram below. The only problem is that when we shutdown the gateway machine internet stops working.
We will discuss in this article the second option as the first one is not recommended. First we need to setup the designated server for ICS then we need to setup the rest of the network to use it as a gateway.
Sharing the dial-up connection.
On the gateway machine do the following steps:
1 Turn off the installed firewall or configure it to trust the computers from the network.
2 Navigate to Network Connections in Control Panel or simply click Start/Run and enter ncpa.cpl
3 Right click on the dial-up connection and choose Properties:
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4 On the top of the Properties page click on Advanced.
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5 Check the Allow network users to connect through this computer's internet connection option and make sure the two options bellow are checked as well.
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6 Make sure the Home networking connection is setup to the Local Area Connection through which you connect the gateway to the network.
7 Apply the changes.
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The gateway has now a static ip.
In the Network Connections window if we right click on the corresponding Local Area Connection and choose Properties and then we highlight Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and choose Properties you will notice that Windows has already set up a static ip on this connection and it's setup to 192.168.0.1
If you want to use a different ip you can change that now. Otherwise just apply the changes.
Now the gateway is ready to provide internet to the rest of the computers in the network. The next steps depend on the type of the device that connects the computers with each other.
Switch/Hub/Peer to Peer
If the computers connect through a device that doesn't have DHCP possibilities (cannot provide an ip) or if we have only one computer connected through a cross-over cable to the gateway, the gateway will provide all the necessary TCPIP information for them so if you have a static ip configured on the clients we have to change that :
1. On each client computer in the Network Connections window right click on the Local Area Connection and choose Properties
2. Highlight Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and choose Properties
3. Make sure that Obtain an ip address automatically & Obtain DNS Server Address Automatically are selected.
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You can still use a static ip on the computers if your network requires that but you have to make sure the static ip configuration looks like this:
ip:192.168.0.x (where x is a number between 2 and 254)
gateway: 192.168.0.1
primary DNS: 192.168.0.1
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Router
If the computers connect to each other through a router all we need to do is to connect the cable that goes to the gateway into the WAN or Internet port of the router.
Note: ICS is not only for dial-up connections. You can also use ICS if you have a computer with two network cards and you don't want to buy a router although for more than two computers with a broadband connection a router is the best solution and also most of the ISP's will provide you with a modem that has more than one ethernet port.
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Submitted by Paul Ionescu
Last modified 2006-06-13 | |
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