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Two computers sharing cable internet connection?
Peter Principle
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I've got two windows XP computers, a 4 port Netgear 10BASE-T ethernet hub (model EN104TP), a Comcast Motorola SB5120 cable modem (with comcast cable internet account) and lots of Cat-5 cable. Three questions:
1) I remember it was a bit of a pain to set up a LAN with W98 computers. Is it any easier with XP?
2) Are there any common pitfalls with XP LANs?
3) Will the hub I've got act as a bottleneck?
1) I remember it was a bit of a pain to set up a LAN with W98 computers. Is it any easier with XP?
2) Are there any common pitfalls with XP LANs?
3) Will the hub I've got act as a bottleneck?
"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business." - Eric Hoffer, _The True Believer_
Peter Principle on
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Yes. A plain-ol hub like you've got, however, will not allow you to share the internet connection unless your ISP will give you two IP addresses, which they usually either 1) won't or 2) will charge you more for. What you should get is a broadband router, that will take the one IP address that your cable company gives you and share it over multiple computers. This will also replace your slow 10baseT hub. There are wired and wireless routers and they are pretty cheap. I recommend the WRT54G by Linksys but you can spend a buttload more if you want the latest in wireless technology.
Oh, the usual. Setting permissions wrong, getting file and printer sharing to work, and so on. It's somewhat better than in the '98 days. Having a broadband router will also help you secure your network, since it will also act as a firewall (you can make connections out, but hosts on the Internet can't make connections back in).
As I said, that's really not the device for this job. Since your cable modem probably tops out at 5-7mbps, in theory it should not be a bottleneck. However, since your computers likely have 100mbit or better cards, then transferring files across the LAN will be slow. Just get a 100mbit broadband router for $20-50 and be done with it.
Just make sure that if you want to be able to drag/drop files from one computer to the other, you checked "Allow other users to modify my files" when setting a folder to be shared.
Interestingly enough, I've used this very hub to share a single internet connection before. It was DSL with a different company, but I didn't arrange for additional IP addresses with my ISP. When it was set up, I would do IPconfig and it would return two different IP addresses. Is it possible that this piece of hardware is or is acting like a router?
Anyway, I'll be setting it up soon enough. Proof of the pudding is in the eating...
The last time I had the netgear hub powered up was right around 2003. Or do you mean my current IP address?
My problem now seems to be that the computers can't see each other on the network. Heh.
I ran the windows network setup wizard, didn't seem to do any good.
The oldschool cheap-ass way to get two computers online, with their own local network, without a router, was to hook them up together with a crossover cable. One computer would act as a router for the other, and 'bridge' the connection. It requires 2 network cards in the "bridging" computer, though.
Unfortunately, you've basically got as good of a situation as you're gonna get right now. Lots of ISPs bind IPs to the modem and only allow 1 per account, and you've got 2. Using a hub, though, the only way you're going to get on a network is if you don't allow both of your computers to have an internet connection -- which also isn't ideal.
How much do you use your network to transfer files? If you don't use it that frequently, or just use it because you can, you can get by with what you've got for a while. The "fix" is to replace the hub with a router, but you can wait to do that until you really need to transfer stuff between your computers.
But shouldn't I have both of these computers networked? The main advertised purpose of the netgear box was to network two computers.
If I search for the "new computer" can see the "old computer" on the network but can't access any shared printers or shared folders on it. Searching for the new computer on the old computer doesn't reveal anything.
Now just sit back and wait for your ISP to mail you a notice saying knock it off or pay extra.
The above posts about the ISP keeping the two machines from seeing each other aren't quite correct. Yes, most modern home internet ISPs make sure that you're not on the same "LAN" as your neighbor, for example. However, if both PCs are connected directly through the same hub in your house, the packets between them should not be routed through the ISP at all. You should be able to connect from one machine to another directly. For example, I believe that if you had one machine do a TCP/IP ping on the other machine, those ping packets would go straight from machine A to machine B. The hub might broadcast them to the ISP as well, but the ISP would/could drop those packets on the floor and you'd still have direct connectivity.
What you've got here, as you've noticed (and solved in a strange way) is a protocol problem. Just because the two computers can't "see" each other in Network Neighborhood does not mean they aren't on a LAN. File and printer sharing can be set up wrong, for example, or the Windows networking protocol can be set up wrong.
The protocol that Windows machines use to share files and printers and connect through the Network Neighborhood is called NetBIOS. NetBIOS can be facilitated over many different lower-level protocols. In Windows XP, NetBIOS is primarily routed over TCP/IP - the Internet Protocol. In previous versions of Windows, NetBIOS is primarily routed over a proprietary protcol called NetBEUI. I'd guess that by installing IPX/SPX you gave both machines a third common underlying protocol, namely the Novell Netware protocol, to route NetBIOS over. I guess this is a solution but something about IPX just feels so...1980s.
I'd bet that if you didn't have IPX installed, you could still share file and printer services, but you'd have to make sure NetBIOS over TCP/IP was set up right on both machines. Since they are both XP machines, this should be feasible. You also have to make sure that permissions are set up right. Failing that, I bet you could use things like the NET command to connect from one computer to another and share files/printers, or type the UNC machine and resource names directly into the address bar (e.g., \\machine1\c$) to use them - even though they don't show up directly in the Network Neighborhood window.
10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255
And you can still access the intertron, you should be free and clear as far as appeasing your ISP with a gateway.