Internet Connection Sharing on my landlord's mac-restricted network

[redg2]

Hi, I have two computers with Windows XP SP3 that I would like to connect to the internet using one ethernet port in the wall.

Computer A is the only computer that is allowed internet access. It has two onboard ethernet ports, one that is plugged into the ethernet port in the wall, and another that Computer B is connected to. However, Computer A is the only mac address that my landlord has allowed on the router, so Computer B does not get internet access and a yellow triangle always appears in the tray saying limited connection.

I wish to turn Computer A into access point for Computer B and share the internet connection just to create a small network, in a similar way that phones can be tethered.

Also, I was unable to turn on ICS. I received a pop up saying the IP is 198.168.0.x that there is an error and ICS cannot be enabled. I think I would have to persuade my landlord to change the IP to 198.168.1.1 in order to fix this but I know that's not going to happen.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[-Alex-]

ICS is the solution. Keep trying at it, or give us a bit more info as to why it's failing.

[redg2]

ICS is the solution. Keep trying at it, or give us a bit more info as to why it's failing.

Thanks for the response. Well, I keep getting this message everytime I try to enable it:

"An error occured while Internet Connection Sharing was being enabled.Internet Connection Sharing cannot be enabled.A LAN connection is already configured with the IP addressthat is required for automatic IP addressing."

Is there anything I can do to fix this?

[+PeterUK MVC]

If your OS was windows 7 you wouldn?t have this problem.

It is possible to get ICS to work in XP but the ICS DHCP and DNS will not work but routeing and static IP's will.

Frist you got to get ICS enabled so what you should be able to do is unplug your connection to this router which should let you enable it. Then because XP ICS will set the shared NIC to 192.168.0.1 which needs to be changed to like 192.168.5.1.

Once down you can connect back to the router and then setup Computer B with this:

IP: 192.168.5.2

Subnet: 255.255.255.0

Gateway: 192.168.5.1

DNS: 8.8.8.8

[redg2]

Unplugging the cable did allow me to enable ICS. So far so good. I then went into TCP/IP properties and set the IP. But then when I plugged the cable back in the internet does not work anymore (Computer A). I rebooted and it still wouldn't work. I had my firewall turned off and it still didn't work. What am I doing wrong here? Is it possible that the network administrator somehow blocked and disabled these features from being used from the router?

Thanks.

[CPressland]

Surely the esiest way is to just grab a Cable Router and have it spoof it's WAN MAC-Address to the same as your computer, then just disable it's SPI Firewall. You'll be double-natting but it'll work fine.

I'll be staying in a Hotel for a few weeks and thats what I'll be doing with my own router so I can have my own WiFi Network :p

[+BudMan MVC]

^ exactly! a router that allows mac cloning is the better solution here. Most any router supports this feature - so $20 at your local computer store and your problem is solved.

As to using ICS - yeah you have to change what network it uses. Just because you change the IP on the nic I don't believe it changes the dhcp it hands out. Did you manually setup the second machine or did you let it use dhcp? What IP and dns and gateway did it get?

Since you say computer A doesn't work I would have to guess is that you changed the IP on the WRONG NIC!!

Since your landlord network is 192.168.0.0/24 I would assume -- you need to change your ICS network. Which with XP I am not even sure if you can?? Been a while since playing with it.. Because its pretty much a useless feature.. Not sure why anyone would use it when you can just buy a nat router for $20

But as suggested if you change the IP of the interface on the ICS nic, not the NIC connected to your internet network -- say to the suggested 192.168.5.1/24 Then you would have to manually setup the client you connect to it with 192.168.5.2 /24 and point to 5.1 as your gateway - and dns.. Not sure if dns will work if you change the IP. So you might have to use another dns like your landlords or opendns/googledns, etc.

Keep in mind -- so you have gig interfaces on one of these boxes that your going to use to connect to the client machine -- or do you have a crossover cable? You have to have something doing the crossover if connecting 2 nic directly together. Be it autocross of one of the gig interfaces or cable.

Post the output of your ics machines ipconfig /all

And then of your ics client machine - and will tell you if you have it right or what you have wrong. But again EASY SOLUTION is go buy a router!

[+PeterUK MVC]

Unplugging the cable did allow me to enable ICS. So far so good. I then went into TCP/IP properties and set the IP. But then when I plugged the cable back in the internet does not work anymore (Computer A). I rebooted and it still wouldn't work.

You likely changed the settings for the wrong NIC for the TCP/IP settings.

Start over and re-enable ICS the NIC with:

192.168.0.1

255.255.255.0

is the one you need to change to:

192.168.5.1

255.255.255.0

The other NIC on Computer A leave as DHCP

On Computer B set with:

IP: 192.168.5.2

Subnet: 255.255.255.0

Gateway: 192.168.5.1

DNS: 8.8.8.8

Also you may need cross over cable.

[redg2]

It worked! THANKS EVERYONE!

[-Alex-]

Great! :D