Vista and Internet Connection Sharing

[Sup3rkirby]

I have tried various sites and tutorials, but yea, nothing has actually worked.

You see, my friend has a modem in his room. His PC is connected by ethernet.

Well, I am all out of routers to give him, so I had some spare wireless adapaters and was gonna give this connection sharing thing a try. Well, supposedly you set up a nice little Ad-Hoc network, and then you edit the properties of the wireless connection you just set up. You go to the 'sharing' tab and click the checkbox that allows other users to use that computer's internet connection.

I had done this before on XP, and usually, a drop down box would appear and you select the connection you want to share. This does not happen. I click 'OK' reguardless, and connect to the newly created network, but no internet.

Any clues? I really have no idea why there is a problem. I've followed several sites exactly and gotten no errors, just no results.

[Smith6612]

Tried checking your firewalls? I've noticed on both Windows XP and Windows Vista that unless you tell your firewall such as Windows firewall to allow other PCs to access services such as HTTP (80) and other web ports, the internet sharing will not work. One thing you should do though, since you seem to want to set up an ad-hoc network, is to create a bridge between the connections. A bridge will still allow communication between the computers, but it will pass every single bit of data on every single service possible to the internet when called for, much like a NAT router.

Bridging a connection in Vista is practically the same as doing it in XP; select two network connections at the same time, right click them and click "Bridge" on the drop down menu and wait for Windows to create the bridge.

[Sup3rkirby]

The connections can NOT be bridged, as I've tried this. There are two connections listed: Ethernet(internet from the modem) and the wireless adapter(for the ad-hoc network).

If I try to bridge, I am told that it can not be done, I believe it said something about needing two wired connections, which made no sense to me(only 1 ethernet port per PC...). Either way Bridging the two connections has failed no matter how I've tried.

I guess it could be a firewall issue, but I am not sure that is the case. I'll try it reguardless. The XP(old PC which wants to connect) does not have a firewall at all. It did not come with the distribution of XP, either that or has not been enabled by default. But the computer attempting to share the connection does, as it is running Vista Ultimate.

Thank you for your help.

[Smith6612]

No problem. XP starting with Service Pack 2 has a built in firewall. With Windows Firewall, it's a matter of looking deeper into the advanced settings to allow services to pass through. Otherwise, I wouldn't know why it won't bridge a wireless connection with an Ethernet connection. I've bridged Infrustructure Wireless to Ethernet before, never Ad-Hoc to Ethernet though.

[fishphotography]

I have tried various sites and tutorials, but yea, nothing has actually worked.

You see, my friend has a modem in his room. His PC is connected by ethernet.

Well, I am all out of routers to give him, so I had some spare wireless adapaters and was gonna give this connection sharing thing a try. Well, supposedly you set up a nice little Ad-Hoc network, and then you edit the properties of the wireless connection you just set up. You go to the 'sharing' tab and click the checkbox that allows other users to use that computer's internet connection.

I had done this before on XP, and usually, a drop down box would appear and you select the connection you want to share. This does not happen. I click 'OK' reguardless, and connect to the newly created network, but no internet.

Any clues? I really have no idea why there is a problem. I've followed several sites exactly and gotten no errors, just no results.

i mananged to get it do work going from wireless to lan so i wonder if there is a way of getting it to go from lan to wifi

[Sup3rkirby]

This became a nightmare yesterday.

The reason I couldn't bridge was because one of the connections(wireless) had ICS(Internet Connection Sharing) enabled. So I turned that off and bridged the two connections.

Well this just became a major problem. The hardwired computer using ethernet lost it's connection, because for some reason the bridge made it so the computer used the ad-hoc network instead of the LAN. There was no way to change it. So then I couldn't remove the two from the bridge and could not delete the bridge. I couldn't even get to safe mode, but after about 5 restarts the bridge could finally be deleted.

Then the main PC had its internet back, and so I tried ad-hoc with ICS again, but nothing would work still.

I ultimately gave up after all the possible configuration attempts(including temporarily disabling the windows firewall), and just decided that if they want internet on more than one PC, they will just need to get a router(that is what they are for after all).

Thanks for your help anyway though.