This is a little complicated so bare with me
I have cable internet in my house, however, I couldn't afford to have a cable connector installed in the room where the computer was at plus I believe it wouldn't have worked anyway due to length restrictions and the fact the my house is about 1/4 a mile away from the street. Anyway, what I did was got a wireless router and hooked it to the cable modem. The wireless router's IP is set to 192.168.0.1 and NEEDS to be that (trust me). So now my computer has a USB wireless adapter attached to it which connects wirelessly to that router. This part works fine and provides me with blazing fast internet speeds. The problem comes when I want my notebook, pda, or UNIX machines to access the internet. For anyone who uses UNIX or LINUX, it's practically impossible to run UNIX efficiently without an internet connection. So I have another router hooked to my main computer; it's both wired and wireless. The UNIX box is connected with a CAT5 cable but the pda and notebook rely on the wireless end of this second router (unfortunately the wireless router connected to the cable modem doesn't have a strong enough signal for my notebook or pda to get a solid connection.)
As far as I've been able to tell, in order to have two network devices running on the same computer, they have to use different subnets and/or different IP classes. Thus the USB wireless adapter is set to IP 192.168.0.x with the subnet at 255.255.0.0 and the gateway and DNS set to 192.168.0.1. The wired NIC is set to 192.168.2.x with a subnet of 255.255.255.0 and no gateway; DNS set to 192.168.0.1. The main computer can connect to the internet via the wireless adapter but unless I use ICS none of the other computers on the network can access the internet. I've tried bridging but the network assumes that the second router is the source of the internet rather than the wireless USB adapter so that rules that out. And if I have both network adapters set to 192.168.0.x I lose internet connectivity completely.
My problem is that ICS "requires" the shared adapter be set to 192.168.0.1 (which is ludicrous - but that's Windows XP for ya.) I found a way around that issue but it tends to catch up with me. Basically I disable both network adapters and then turn on ICS that way when I re-inable them the settings aren't changed and the wireless adapter is shared. Although this works by allowing all of the computers on the network to connect to the internet eventually Windows freaks out and I get IPNATHLP 30013 error which causes the computer to reboot without warning. The error log reports that the DHCP allocator can't function properly and thinks it needs to shutoff; Windows, of course, thinks that the DHCP allocator NEEDS to be running and so when it shuts off Windows freaks and reboots to restart the service.
One last point (if you're not completely lost and confused by all of this ) UNIX doesn't work directly with the wireless USB adapter because it's based on NDIS-5 architecture.
here's a rough sketch:
[CABLE MODEM]__________[WIRELESS ROUTER #1]- - - - - - (wireless signal)- - - - - [MAIN COMPUTER]____{WIRELESS ROUTER #2}_____[UNIX COMPUTER]
Any help or ideas would be appreciated. Thanks
