Help Bridge Connection WinXp

[abombss]

I just got myself a new ipaq and I have the Socket Wi-Fi card. At work I have my laptop running XP Pro which I connect to the corporate network through an ethernet card, and I have a wireless card as well. I am able to gain access to the Corporate network and Internet through my ethernet card, and I am able to ping and talk to my ipaq via 802.11b through an ad-hoc connection with my WI-FI card. What can't do is bridge my ethernet and wireless connections to allow my ipaq to access the corporate network and the internet.

The ethernet card is configured via DHCP with an ip address in the range 10.164.84.x and a subnet of 255.255.255.0. I configured my wireless card for ad-hoc and a static ip 192.168.1.200 and a gateway of 192.168.1.0. My ipaq is configured static as 192.168.1.199 and a gateway of 192.168.1.0.

I have tried many different setups, ip, subnets, etc and I can't get this to work. If I bridge the connections in XP, I lose communications with the ipaq but can talk from the laptop to the corporate network. When I use ICS I also lose communication between the ipaq and the laptop.

Any help would be appreciated. I have found very little useful information about bridges and xp.

Thans,

abombss

[kfluet]

The ethernet card is configured via DHCP with an ip address in the range 10.164.84.x and a subnet of 255.255.255.0. I configured my wireless card for ad-hoc and a static ip 192.168.1.200 and a gateway of 192.168.1.0. My ipaq is configured static as 192.168.1.199 and a gateway of 192.168.1.0.


The first thing that jumps out is that 192.168.1.0 is not a valid gateway. An IP address that ends in zero is a "network" IP. Such addresses are used in routing tables to describe the whole 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.254 network.

On the XP machine, the gateway should be left blank in the settings for your WiFi card. On the iPAQ, the gateway should be set to the IP of the XP machine (192.168.1.200), because it is acting as your gateway.

Important: This is all assuming that you or your network admin have set up the routing on 10.164.84.x network so machines in that network know that the 192.168.1.x network is reached through your XP machine. If this is not the case, then the easiest thing to do is set the XP machine to share it's Ethernet link with it's WiFi link.

If you need to set up sharing instead:

Under the settings for your Ethernet LAN (not your WiFi card) on your XP machine, set to Share under the Advanced tab. List your WiFi connection as the network connection to share.

When you first set it to share, XP will warn you that it was setting the WiFi link to 192.168.0.1 or something like that. That's good.

Set your iPAQ to get it's IP address using DHCP (automatically).

It should just work.

I hope this helps.

-- Kevin

[abombss]

Thanks Kevin for the help. The reason I think I couldn't get this to work was because I had a bridge setup on XP, even though it was disabled and I had ICS setup on my ethernet card, I think it caused some errors. It also took awhile to get my ipaq to acquire an ip via dhcp, I wish Socket had a simple release / renew utility and some ping utilities that I could use in ad-hoc mode.

Secondly, now that it works, I can get Internet / Intranet access on my ipaq. What I cannot get is access to network shares and servers. I am assuming ICS is blocking this somehow. My ipaq connection does not have a WINS server, does this matter? I tried connecting to local file shares using both the UNC with computer name and the IP. Neither works. Any thoughts on getting past this one? Internet access is nice, but if would be much more useful if I could access to the company network. This is why I thought I might need a bridge not a router solution.

Just a side note, at home via infastructure mode, not ad-hoc with ICS, my ipaq can access all of my Network shares no problem.

Thanks again for the help.

abombss