Share a dialup connection with a wireless router

Feb 21, '06 05:14:00AM

Contributed by: pakmn

Do you have a few computers networked at home with a wireless laptop, and only a dialup connection to share among them?

Well, I live only a few minutes from a large city, but still don't have access to high speed connectivity of any sort. I have two towers and one laptop at home, and was having issues with my wireless signal strength (I was just using a software base station). So I bought a D-link DI-624 wireless router to increase my network range. However, when I got it home and set it up, the default internet sharing preferences weren't working. I looked for ages (on a dialup connection, which took forever), but couldn't find any solutions that worked. After reading up about how internet sharing works and sleeping on it, I figured it out. It basically involves turning off the default DHCP server on the router, and using 192.168.2.xx IPs, which is what apple uses to share the connection.

First connect the Ethernet cables from the two machines to the LAN ports of the router. Then go to the computer which has the modem connected, and go to the Sharing preferences panel. Turn on personal web sharing, and under the Firewall tab, open the https port 443. Finally, on the Internet tab, select Share Connection from Modem to Computers Using Built-in Ethernet. Go to Network preferences, select Network Port Configurations from the drop down, and drag the internal modem to the top of the list, or at least above Ethernet.

Now open Safari and type in http://192.168.0.1 (this is the default router address, it may be different for other routers), and type in your admin password. Find how to turn off the DHCP server, and do so. Then change the router's IP address to 192.168.2.100. Note the subnet address, mine was 255.255.255.0.

Now go back to System Preferences, go to the Network pane, and select your built-in Ethernet connection from the list. Under the TCP/IP tab, select Configure Manually, and set the IP to 192.168.2.101, the subnet to 255.255.255.0, adn the router to 192.168.2.100.

Now for the other Ethernet connected computer, follow the same procedure for changing the Ethernet connection, but use 192.168.2.102 as the IP. For the wireless computer, do the same thing, but under the AirPort connection in Network preferences. Note that you can have both AirPort and Ethernet connections enabled at the same time, just connect manually using different IP addresses.

Your modem-connected computer may need a restart to actually start Internet Sharing. Make sure to change the router preferences to enable password protection of your wireless connection if you live within 300 feet of your neighbors, and change the network name from default (be original, people). And remember your new router address is 192.168.2.100! If you reset your router, all these settings are lost and must be repeated.

That should be it, get ready to surf at blazing speeds...

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