Hymagumba wrote:But would the firewall installed on the XP machine be looking out and blocking 98 specific attacks?
When using the NAT shared networking in Virtual PC to allow virtual machines internet access, it's supposedly fine to have no antivirus and/or firewall on a virtual machine because it's not really connected to the internet - it's just having packets intercepted from it and forwarded to it which are actually being transmitted/received using the physical internet connection on the host machine and so the protection on that connection should be fine for the virtual machine too.
By using a proxy, surely I'm essentially just doing the same thing and so the XP machine's antivirus and firewall should be able to protect both machines.
just remember that the 'subnet mask' is not equal to and does not in itself define the subnet. the subnet mask really only specifies how big the subnet address space is.
if you've got the subnet mask set on all stations as 255.255.255.0, then 192.168.1.x and 192.168.2.x are not actually on the same subnet, and so hosts in each range can't directly communicate with one another without going through a router - if you can ping between the two then your windows xp box is routing between the two network interfaces. i'm actually perplexed that in this configuration you can't access the net from the windows 98 box directly - i assume you've tried it with the firewall off? - if so then maybe dns is the problem here?
can you perform a dns lookup on the windows 98 box now (ie, when you type 'ping news.bbc.co.uk' does the news.bbc.co.uk address get resolved to an ip address - even if traffic doesn't get there?) does traffic reach news.bbc.co.uk from the 98 box?
because you are using a proxy on the xp machine the dns lookups will be happening there, so just because it works in your browser doesn't mean that dns is working correctly on the machine.
a firewall for windows 98 would be pointless, the whole reason as to why you need to firewall a windows nt (and above) box is simply because it is remotely manageable - windows 98 isn't. there might be some obscure exploit windows 98 which could allow an attacker to gain access, but truly i would not bother.
in any case, i would suspect that your dsl router is set to do network address translation, and so the internal hosts of your network won't be directly accessible unless you've set up a routing rule for them, so the proxy won't be accessible from outside your lan.
like sput says, if you can find an antivirus solution for windows 98 that works, it certainly won't hurt to stick it on.
My cludge worked fine for all of yesterday, with all the updates to be applied to 98 lots of data was happily zipping over the proxied connection.
When turning my computer on this morning (having changed nothing yesterday), I found the internet going 'in and out' - it would work for a few minutes, then stop for about 20, then come back on again. When resetting the router did nothing I assumed it to be an ISP problem.
Then I found out that my housemate had no problems.
Closer inspection reveals that when the internet is 'down' what is actually happening is the XP box is trying to connect to the net through the wired connection - which of course won't work because there's no internet connection on it. Then miraculously, every so often it stops this behaviour and works - for a few minutes until it starts doing it again. When it's 'down' I can still ping the router and access resources elsewhere on the network through the router so the network is still working.
When it's doing this, If I bring up the status for both connections and try to ping the IP of my internet connection, the packets are only being sent out on the wired connection, the box isn't even trying to use the wireless, so they're not being bounced back by the router - then as mentioned above, eventually it will miraculously just start working properly for a few minutes, then go again.
Most bizarrely of all, if I unplug the network cable from the wired NIC, it STILL tries to divert internet traffic to the disconnected connection and ignores the still connected wireless - ping then comes back with 'Hardware Error'.
I've tried disabling the local and router based firewalls, and checked the priority order of the connections.
The only way to stabilise the connection is to disable the wired NIC completely.
Anyone have any idea would could cause something as strange as this, especially as I had it working perfectly yesterday and nothing has changed since then.
OK, well yet another restart seemed to cure it! Weird! This of course though means that I have no way of knowing why it happened or whether it will happen again.
I did check the binding order of the NICs, the wireless is prioritised above the wired. Surely though even if the wired NIC took priority, then when there was no response from that it should have tried the other one, not just tried one, got no response so gave up.
