Internet Connection sharing from XP to Fedora..Please Help Me

[snaggapuss]

Hi. Im still a bit of newbie to Linux. But anyway I was going to ask if somebody could help me out with a step by step guide. My problem is, I have a broadband connection connected to a Winblows XP home edition machine the has two NIC's. One for the broadband and one for the Fedora Core 4 machine that networks off of that. What I was wanting to do is share my XP internet connection with my Fedora machine. Could anybody please help to shed some light. Also I have Samba shares sharing to my XP machine, if I share my internet connection would I be still able to run Samba. Please help...........

[jim]

save yourself the headache and buy a router

[capnlinux]

I am pretty sure that you will need to upgrade your XP Home to XP Pro to do Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) as this is not available in the Home edition. It would be cheaper to just buy a router if your broadband connection comes in on Ethernet and not Serial or USB. The router has the additional advantage that it will act as a firewall and protect both computers to some extent.

[dickinsd]

Internet connection sharing is available in XP home ed.

You have 2 NIC's one is already connected to your dsl modem correct?

The other is to the Fedora machine.

On Windows machine:
Click Start > Click Connect To > Click Show All Connections
(Alternatively go to My Network Places and Click View Network Connections from the menu on the left)
Right click on the 1st NIC (to dsl modem), choose properties. Go to the Advanced tab and tick the box to Allow other network users to connect through this computers internet connection.
Click Ok.

You will get a message telling you that Windows is going to 're address' the other NIC to 192.168.0.1
Click OK

Fedora machine
Click Desktop > Click System Settings > Click Network
Enter Admin Password
In the Devices tab you will see the network device probably listed as eth0.
Single Left click on this device and then click on Edit (top of the window)
Select: Statically set IP address:

Provide following details:
IP address: 192.168.0.2
Subnet: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.0.1
Now Click OK

Now select the DNS tab. Provide the Primary DNS:

192.168.0.1
Click File > Click Save

You will be told changes are saved and you may want to restart the network.
Click OK

Close the Network Configuration Window

Open your web browser of choice and you should find that all is now working the way you want.

If you have any problem first open a terminal and try ping 192.168.0.1 to make sure that the 2 computers are communicating, if not then you need to restart the network device, not sure on command for that so just shut down and restart then try again, any more problems come back, let me know and might be able to help further.

Dave

PS, if you got a few quid, then a nice router will be a lot better, using the above method will require 2 PC's on every time you want to use the web, a router would only require One PC.

[snaggapuss]

Hey Dave

Thanks for your help. I followed the step by step guide you wrote. I followed it with no problems at all........but it's still not working....I can get a reply from pinging my windows machine. But when I try a webpage it takes a long time trying to find the page and then comes back saying it can not find the page. Any other idea's in mind... Im trying to put off buying a router for now if I can help it.

[Iron_Mike]

You have to set up a static route on your XP box. Not sure how XP home would do this but. Unix is "route add 192.168.0.1 "1st nic IP address". It tells everything that hits the 192.168.0.1 NIC to route it to the other NIC. That's why you can ping the .0.1 NIC but goes no farther....Also try to ping a website using their IP address, if you can ping the ip address but not using the name i.e yahoo.com you have a DNS issue.....

[capnlinux]

Thanks for the correction about XP Home having ICS. I wasn't sure if it did. Your problem now is probably just the DNS server. Rather than use 192.168.0.1 as in the example above, you need to look at what your XP box is using for DNS and copy that ip into the Linux box. Open a CMD prompt on windows and do 'ipconfig /all' without the quotes. Somewhere in that output should be listed the DNS servers being used by windows. Use those for you Linux box as well.