Wireless network diagram

[Harry Kuhman]

.... I didn't understand a lot of it but I want to clear up a point. I don't intend to connect my router directly to the Internet....

No, I understood that you didn't. The problem is that the people who designed it did intend for it to be connected to a DSL or Cable modem that is attached to the Internet. nOt at all sure why you have a DSL/Cable router if you don't have cable or DSL. I'm a very big advocate of using one of these routers, but it wasn't intended for use with Dial-up or to be part of another larger local network.

I don't know the proper technical terms but I'm trying to wireless connect my Compaq and Linux boxes to the router and then (bridge ?) to my WinXP box via 1 of the 4 LAN connector on the router.

What I think you really wanted to have for this was a wireless access point. Unfortunately, that can be different than the router, which serves as an access point, but also as a DHCP server, a firewall, a switch, and provides local private network addresses to it's users (NAT). You still might be able to do what you want with it, but if you expect to network with the XP box (rather than just share it's Internet connection), then you will have to be able to disable the DHCP server in that router and only use the access point and switch portions of it. You also mentioned the 4 LAN connectors. The router actually has 5 ethernet connectors; one that normally goes to the cable or DSL modem. The normal way to try to use this device to make a private network would be to leave DHCP functional and plug that 5th ethernet port into whatever connects to the Internet. But since that's your system running ISC then it would not be able to share files or printers with the other 2 computers. Yes, you very well might be able to get things to work if you diable the DHCP server, don't use that 5th port and connect the router to the ICS system by one of the other 4 ports.

I have no experience with ICS, although there has been a lot of discussion of it in the Networking forum. Even getting a knoppix system connected in without going through a wireless access point has been a problem for some who have tried; I would look over the existing posts and see what people had to do to make this work; you'll need whatever they needed and maybe a little more.

Obviously you have reasons that you are still on dial-up, but you might want to consider a connection that the router was designed for. In your area BellSouth's DSL Lite should not cost much more than dial-up, and cable is often much cheaper than regular DSL and twice as fast as regular DSL. Of course, all of the ISP's have their problems, so do your homework before you make any commitment.

I then hope to use ICS to connect (ONE AT A TIME) any of the 3 boxes to the Internet.

No, you're missing the point of what ICS does. ICS gets the internet connection and the XP has internet access. In doing so the Internet Service provider assigns you an IP address (one). The computer doing ICS then looks and sees what other computers are wishing to use ICS. It assigns them local IP addresses (addresses that can not be routed over the Internet). These computers then build up UDP and TCP/IP requests for the Internet using the ICS computer as a gateway. When the packet gets to the ICS computer, the ICS computer knows that it cannot be sent to the internet (since it has a non-routable address as the return address). It then builds a packet of it's own to cary the information in the original packet. In some cases it may have to reassig ports or do some other tricks as well, but the packet gets built. It also makes an entry in a table so that when it gets a response it will know which address to send the response to. It then sends out the packet to the ISP with it's own IP address in the reply-to address (the one the ISP assigned it). When a response comes back it can check it's table and know where the incoming data is really intended for, and it builds a packet and sends it on to the right system. So, the end result is that all computers on the network have access to the Internet at the same time, even on dial-up, and even though the ISP sees you as one user and has assigned you only one IP address. Will not be very fast if multiple computers are doing stuff at once on dial-up, but everyone will be connected. In fact, I doubt if you could not have the XP box connected when the others are, since it must be on and running the modem for you.

By the way, this Network Address Translation or NAT that ICS does is also what the router does when it is used in it's intended manner. The router would serve as the ICS computer and translate packets coming from the other systems. That's why you would never be able to see the computers behind the router for file and printer sharing.

I can ping the router from any of the 3 boxes....

Great news, that seems to tell s that at least you've resolved the wireless with Linux issues..

if I can solve the addressing problem
I believe it can work. I am going to move to the wireless forum... really dumb that I posted here in the ifrst place. Rhanks for the advice.

As to the addressing issue, you'll need to make sure that the router is not giving out addresses and get ICS running. ICS is not something I know enough to give advice on, so I hope someone else or the history of old posts can help you there.

Yea, this all belongs in the networking section. I'll make that happen.