Network Bridging - Techie Help Needed

[cwathen]

Can anyone help with this one?

I'm trying to get two computers on the internet. One runs XP Home and connects over wifi to a wireless router two floors down. No problem there.

The other is an older machine running Windows 98SE. It has wired ethernet, but running a cable back to the router is out of the question, and I no one seems to still make wifi cards which will work with 98, so it doesn't look like I can get it on wireless.

I *thought* I had a simple solution - hard wire the two machines together using a crossover cable, then use XP's network bridging feature to bridge the wireless and wired connections together so the 98 machine would connect to the XP machine which in turn would connect to the router.

However, despite now 2 hours of fiddling, I just cannot get this to work.

Before setting up the bridge, I end up with 'limited or no conectivity' on the wired connection which will happen since they end up with an autoconfigured IP address due to there being no DHCP to assign one, but they will quite happily share files between each other, so I'm satisfied that there is a working connection between the two machines.

The wifi connection also continues to work quite happily to connect to the internet and the rest of the network.

But as soon as I set up the bridge, not only do the two connections not talk to each other, but they no longer even work separately; I lose all network connectivity on both connections (the newly created 'Network Bridge' connection ends up with no IP address).

I then have to unbridge in order to get anything to work again.

I've tried forcing IP addresses on the wired connection, disabling the firewall, forcing compatibility mode on the wifi card, disabling and renabling connections, restarting computers, restarting the router.

But I just can't seem to get this to work - yet most of what I'm reading on the internet suggests it should be as straightforward as I thought it was.

Any idea how to get the bridging to work? Or another way to achieve what I want?

[Sput]

Totally different tack involving spending money: Get a cheap old router, hard wire it to the windows 98 computer and flash it with 3rd party firmware like dd-wrt. You can then have it connect to your existing wifi network as a client (dd-wrt lets you do this, some routers do it out of the box). What you'd then have is an external and highly compatible wifi adapter connected to your '98 computer via ethernet.

[Dr Lobster*]

this is a strange configuration.

a couple of things to try:

what can you ping from the windows 98 box? can you ping the windows xp workstation?

can you ping the router from the 98 box?

can you perform a dns lookup from the windows 98 box?

it might just be that the default gateway and or dns is incorrect. if windows xp is truely acting as a router between the two interfaces, you'll need to put the ip address of the windows xp box (try the external interface first) as the default gateway of the windows 98 box.

try putting the ip address of the xp box as your dns server also, if not try putting the address of the router in if you're getting dns issues.

if you've left the default gateway blank, this is probably why it's not working.

let me know how you get on.

[Dr Lobster*]

just re-read your post. what happens if you configure the bridge and give each machine a static ip address in the same subnet as the router, so: (for example)

router: 192.168.0.1
xp box: 192.168.0.2
98 box: 192.168.0.3

set default gateway on 98 box to: 192.168.0.2
set default gateway on xp box to: 192.168.0.1
set dns on 98 box to 192.168.0.2
set dns on xp box to 192.168.0.1

if you can ping the router from the 98 box with this configuration, you're halfway there. you might need to then set dns to 192.168.0.1 on both boxes if it's not being forwarded from the xp box.

using the above set up, what can you ping? and do dns lookups work?

[subnet mask should be 255.255.255.0]

[cwathen]

Thanks for the suggestions.The problem seems to be more fundamental then configuration - the bridge just isn't made correctly. After bridging the two connections, the network bridge ends up with no IP address initially, and eventually an auto configuration one, and the individual connections show as not connected at all.

The only thing which responds to pinging is the autoconfiguration address on the 'network bridge' connection. But on closer examination, this only works on the XP machine hosting the bridge, and no packets are actually sent or received through any physical connection during this ping, so the virtual adapter is just looping around in software, it's not actually talking to any network hardware.

I did wonder if it was some weird issue with the particular equipment I was using (and if Windows 98 was causing an issue somewhere), so I tried connecting my laptop and my netbook in this way - the laptop was left talking to the router with Wifi, whilst the wifi in the netbook was disabled and a crossover cable linked the ethernet ports on the two machines together. Both run XP Home, and all I did was select the wireless and wifi on the latop and told XP to bridge them - according to most of what I've read, this should just work. Yet still the same thing happens, the network simply doesn't work with the connections bridged, all the physical connections show disconnected.

Whilst I appreciate the first suggestion of getting hold of another router and reflashing it, I can't really justify spending money on this, and I fail to see why this just won't work - surely this kind of situation is exactly why the network bridging feature is there???!!??!!

[Sput]

oooh can you use internet connection sharing on the "in between" computer?

[Dr Lobster*]

did you try to set each workstation with a static ip address in the same subnet as the router?

the reason for this is that since dhcp is a broadcast protocol the windows xp bridge may not forward it to the router and so you'll never get an ip address and you'll be stuck in the endless cycle of nothingness.

[cwathen]

Despite further trying and all your advice, I've got nowhere with the network bridging or the built in ICS.

I've finally ended up with a less elegant solution - using a proxy server. Although this works, I'm not sure how secure it is. Can any of the more learned people look at this and identify whether or not it's OK?

The wireless connection is forced to use 192.168.1.2 with the gateway and DNS set to 192.168.1.1 (the address of the router) - it's quite happy with this as this was all it was doing when working through DHCP anyway.

The wired connection is then forced to use 192.168.2.1 (thought I'd take my wired 'network' into a different series), with 192.168.1.2 (the IP of the wireless card) specified as the gateway and DNS.

The 98 machine is then forced to use 192.168.2.2, with 192.168.2.1 as gateway and DNS (the IP of the wired NIC on the XP box).

All 3 connections are set to the same subnet of 255.255.255.0

With this done, the 98 machine can then ping 192.168.1.2 (the address of the wireless card in the XP machine) so I have now got the two connections linked as I was trying to do in the first place.

Then I've simply got AnalogX running on the XP box, opened port 6588 on the firewall, and set the proxy settings on 98 to connect to 192.168.1.2 on port 6588.

The 98 machine currently does not have any anti virus or firewall on it, which I've reasoned is OK because it doesn't have a direct connection to the internet, and the machine which does has it's own anti virus and firewall provision which should track any nasties before the get to/from the 98 machine. Is my thinking sound here or should the 98 box have it's own protection?

[Sput]

Firewall: you're PROBABLY okay without, but definitely get antivirus.

[Pete]

But would the firewall installed on the XP machine be looking out and blocking 98 specific attacks?

[marksi]

I ordered a cheap wireless bridge recently, then spent a number of hours swearing at it, before giving up and sending it back and using a cable.