Combining Dial-Up and Ethernet TCP/IP forbidden?

[AlanV]

Due to moving furniture around in my house, I now have two PC's formerly connected by an Ethernet crossover cable in different rooms. I bought a router and a wireless adapter and got both PC's talking to each other and sharing a single printer (the main goal) for the cost of a new printer.

However, it seems that I can't use a dial-up Internet connection without breaking the Ethernet network. Am I correct in guessing that I can't use both of them? My hope was to use my browser on computer A, open an HTML file on computer B, click a link, have the Internet connection start automatically on computer A (as it does stand-alone), and then print over my network to the printer attached to computer B.

When both PC's start, my network is established, but a dial-up connection must be started manually or the browser tells me it can't find the external URL in the HTML file from computer B. If I start the connection manually I lose the network connection between computers A and B. Can TCP/IP only use one adapter at a time? Is there a graceful way to toggle between them, or is my only option to upgrade dial-up to more expensive DSL or cable?

Thanks, Alan

[doctorgonzo]

What version of Windows do you have? You can do this with ICS (Internet Connection Sharing).

[AlanV]

Sorry, I guess that would help some. I am using Windows 98SE on both machines. I thought it would be silly to use ICS for dial-up, but if it gets the job done, I will look into it tonight. Thanks!

[doctorgonzo]

You aren't going to be getting blazing speeds by sharing your dial-up connection, true. But what you are attempting to do is connect two networks together (your home network and the Internet) and to do that, you need to have a router between them. That's what ICS does.

[AlanV]

Well, I installed ICS on my host computer and need to install a client on the other computer, but my router no longer exists. The ICS host is now at 192.168.0.1 as the router, and my Linksys router at 192.168.1.1 cannot be accessed from Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. How does ICS connect the two if the host has a wired adapter and the client has a wireless adapter? That's why I bought the Linksys router, basically to act as a switch (bridge?).

[doctorgonzo]

Okay, I saw "crossover cable" and didn't see "formerly", so I thought they were still connected by a crossover cable. That's a tough one. I'm not familiar enough with ICS to know all of the configuration options there are.

[glc]

What you need to do is reconfigure the router to act as a simple switch and wireless access point. Remove ICS, reboot, log into the router, change its IP to 192.168.0.254, and turn off the internal DHCP server. Then you can reshare the dialup. The ICS host will provide DHCP. Do not use the WAN jack on the router.

If you only have dialup, you should not have bought a router. You should have bought a plain switch and a wireless access point.