extending a network using XP bridging from a wireless PC

[Larry Klein]

I have a cable modem conencted to a wireless router
(netgear 802.11G) on the first floor of my house. On the
second floor I have a PC with an SMC wireless PCI card in
it that conencts just fine to the router and the
internet. So far, so good.

I now want to add another computer upstairs. I could buy
another wireless PC card, but I happen to have some PCI
NIC's lying around so I put one in the computer that has
the wireless card in it, and the other in the new
computer. I bought a bridge, and connected the two
computers together through the bridge. I enabled the NIC
on the PC with the wireless card and both connections
show up as alive. The wireless connection gets the IP
address from the router downstairs. Again, so far so good.

However, I now want to allow the new PC to get an IP
address from the router, so I set up a bridge on the PC
with the wireless and PCI NIC in it. It sets up with no
error messages but I also lose any IP addresses that I
had from the router and cannot connect to the internet.

so, the questions are:

1) Can I do what I want to do here? Everything I read
about bridging said it should, but it says nothing about
whether I can do this when the one connection is wireless.

2) I can assign an IP address to the new network item
called the network bridge, but cannot assign one to any
of the two network connections that were bridged. I am
missing how this is implemented. If I understand what
each piece is trying to do, I could probably debug this
problem.

Thanks for any help,
Larry

 

[Larry Klein]

Well, I managed to get this to work, almost completely
the way I want, but its taken alot more not-easily foudn
steps to get there.

I bumped into a link to a microsoft KB article about how
bridging might not work if the NIC's are not
in "promiscuous" mode. You have to use the netsh utility
to put them in this mode if they are not. I did this for
both adapters, and suddenly I have my IP back on the
bridge computer. However, the new PC cannot get an IP
address using DHCP. So I give it a static IP address in
the same subnet as everybody else, copy the DNS servers
IP addresses too, and wow, everything works.

EXCEPT: When I ask my router what clients it sees, it
will report the IP address of the bridge PC, with its MAC
address, but the name of the new PC!. This is probably
why DHCP won;t work: I assume that the DHCP server
decides that it cannot give out two IP addresses to two
clients with the same MAC address. BUT, why does the
bridge not pass through the MAC address of the new PC,
separately from the MAC address of the bridge PC? Again I
can find no documentation for this anywhere.

The Knowledgebase artical that describes how to check and
put the NIC's into promiscuous mode is artical number
Q302348.