Some help with wireless network please

[Guest glynton]

Hi guys, totally not about SP, but was wondering if anyone knew how to set up a PC to act as a wireless access point. I want to be able to utilise the wired network we have in our house from my wireless laptop. The PC has a wireless usb adapter. We tried all the different settings in XP, but it always sets up the wirless network as an 'Ad-Hoc' peer to peer network. I just want the PC to create a wireless bubble for the Wired Network. Anyone know how?

Thanks

Glyn

[Guest awarner [MVP]]

Moved to Off Topic general

[Guest Firaas]

Hi Glyn,

I'm not sure if I understand what exactly you're asking, but I think this is your setup:

PC - wireless card

Laptop - wireless card

... without any access points or routers. Could you confirm that that's right? How many laptops/desktops are there?

[Guest morpheus2702]

Have a look at these sites - may be able to give you some pointers:

www.trendware.com

www.belkin.co.uk

[Guest fraser]

You must use ad-hoc mode if you don't have an access point device. There's nothing wrong with ad-hoc for a home network; the main disadvantages are that you can't do hand-overs to other access points if you are moving around, and also each machine must be inrange of each other machine (unless you tweak the routing that is!). Also, you can't use improved WEP systems like Cisco's LEAP, but I doubt you have an EAP server running anyway! :wink:

For a home network, these things don't matter.

[Guest cpt_andy]

If I understand you correctly, you want to setup a network bridge on the desktop PC. Go to 'Network Connections', select both your Wireless connection and your Wired connection and go to file, right-click and go to Bridge Connections. You can then connect to the desktop from the laptop using ad-hoc and access the whole network.

Cpt. Andy

[Guest glynton]

I tried bridging the networks, but it didnt work

[Guest fraser]

Can you ping one host from the other? What IP addresses do they have?

(Click Start/Run, type "cmd", hit OK, then type "ipconfig" to see IP addresses)

[Guest glynton]

Well, when we bridged the networks, i couldn't ping the Internet gateway (an ADSL Router).

[Guest fraser]

I understand, forget that, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Your desired connection to the net looks like the following on the laptop:

laptop wifi - desktop wifi - desktop lan - adsl

Now, each of these will have it's own IP address, so the desktop has two.

As you already need to run the desktop to get wifi, the simplest way to set it up is to have the desktop do the NAT/DHCP stuff. That way, the laptop is also behind your desktops firewall.

First things first though. Find out the IP address of each step above using my previous instructions. Then on the laptop, try to ping it's neighbour. If that works, try to ping the IP of the desktops ethernet card. You'll see two IPs on the desktop when you do the ifconfig.

Post the results back here. It's complicated, so we need to know exactly where the problem lies.

[Guest Rob.P]

Now to confuse things, I'm having the reverse prob, I can't seem to connect to my mates laptop from mine using Ad-Hoc.

I have a wireless router at home which runs my network and such like, but when I go round my mates I try to connect to his on Ad-Hoc for simple file-sharing but just can't see his comp on the network or vice versa, yet the wireless is saying connected to my mates comp.

I take it I'm missing a simple settings change somewhere?

[Guest fraser]

Like I said, try pinging the various hosts and posting results. All network debugging starts with a ping, as it shows whether the basic level of connectivity is working.

[Guest Rob.P]

yeah we got pinging each other ok, as we can connect on games (sorry should have mentioned that), just won't pop up through network places to share folders and such like, I've just shot meself in the foot there, if I can ping then I should be able to just tap in the network address of the folder rather than go through the GUI, will try that and maybe switch on my brain before I ask Q's :oops: :)