"Unable to open socket" error

[Kev']

Hi guys, this is probably a stupid question, but it has to be asked - 2 machines now are affected by this quandry. I have a 98se box with a modem, satellite and network card as my internet access. The only networking protocol used is netbui. I am using a third party program to do the modem sharing - "ishare". Ishare comes in 2 flavours, 98 and NT. The 98se boxes I have work fine with the access machine. But I am now trying to connect some NT machines to the same network. Bot machines behave the same, they have full network / disk / file access, but when you try and connect to the net with ishare, it comes back with a "cannot open a network socket" error. Does anyone have any ideas as to why? I suspect it's a protocol issue, but cannot find any answers on the net that answer this issue. I know I should have the NT machine as the gateway, and connect the 98 machines off it, and will do this eventually, but the NT machines have only been build, and are old machines, duel pentium (digital prioris) and duel ppro. Because of this it would take quite some doing to put the required cards into either of them - limited slots of the correct type available.
Any assistance with this would be most appreciated.

Thanks.

Kev'

[glc]

You need TCP/IP to connect to the net - "cannot open a socket" is referring to no Winsock available.

[Kev']

Hi thanks for the reply, but tcp/ip killed my machine, all modem sharing - and now I have to reinstall - thanks... I do not believe that tcp/ip is the answer, if 98 can work netbui, why can't NT? tcp/ip has never worked for me - and me trying again has just made things worse...

Kev'

[beemer]

What glc is saying is that tcp/ip is the only protocol for connecting to the Internet. Netbui is not an option.

[Kev']

Okay, so I'm confused, yet again. NT needs tcp/ip? to connect to a 98 host? Come on, if 98 works with 98, why does NT need more? So teach me a lesson, I have run netbui on 98 clients and server (ishare) it has been the only prog to work reliably. But now I want to run NT machines off my 98 interface, tcp/ip, it kills me every time. How come so far netbui has been the only protcol that I have had to use to connect to the internet, with 6 machines? I just don't get it - or do I? Did I search out an internet sharing prog' that would work with it?
So, if I do go to tcp/ip, can someone guide me through it?
I know networking, ip addressing, protocols, but why NT won't work with 98 - I'll stand to be corrected...

Kev'

[Dave22]

You can set up an internal Windows network with only NetBEUI... it doesn't need TCP/IP to run locally (on your private/internal network). But, if you want to connect to the Internet, you MUST have TCP/IP installed. TCP/IP doesn't have to be installed on ALL machines... only the ones that need Internet connectivity.

IOW - if you have only ONE machine on your internal network that you want to give Internet access to, then you install TCP/IP on that one. You will still be able to network to other machines using NetBEUI (you'd be running both protocols on that machine). Obviously, the machine that's doing your Internet sharing needs TCP/IP too.

What exactly do you mean when you say that TCP/IP "killed" your machine?