ICS client PCs lose internet connection

[Jeffery Allison Sr]

Help,

I have WinXP using ICS to share internet connect with 3
PCs on a wired network. The problem is that the client
PCs periodially lose the ability to access the internet
through the shared connection. ICS is still up and
running, file sharing been the networked PCs still but
the internet connection doesn't. How can I resolve this
problem?

Also, can anyone suggest a good firewall application that
works with ICS. I have recently installed Mcafee
personal firewall plus and it made the ICS connections
worst.


Thanks for your assistance.

Jeffery, Sr.

 

[Paul B T Hodges]

Hey Jeffery,

Perhaps the problem is the firewall.
Some firewall Personal Versions don't support routing, so the ics machine
can't pass on the packets from the client to the internet. I know this is
true for zone alarm personal version, you need to run ZA Professional on the
ICS host for clients to access the internet.

When a client can't access the internet check that ip routing is still
enabled on the ics host,

start/run
cmd
ipconfig/all

How does the client obtain its ip address automatically or is it hard
coded.?
With ics the host should be running a simple dhcp server.
Do you have any other dhcp server set up on your netwwork ?
Check the ip address on the client to make sure its on the same subnet, the
default would be for the ics system to be on 192.168.0.1 and the client on
192.168.0.X

If the client shows a 169.xxx.xxx.xxx address it wasn't able to pick its ip
from the ics host and has fallen back to using automatic addressing. Since
it would be on a different sub net, it woudn't be able to communicate with
the ics host.

Paul

 

[Bill O'Connell]

Try Zone Alarm Pro as your firewall.

 

[Paul Woodsford]

I have a 3 PC wired network using ICS and have installed ZoneAlarm Free on
all PC's.
ZA Free works well if properly set-up with all the PC's names and IP
addresses added
to the Trusted Zone and the Trusted Zone set to Medium or Low

 

[Paul B T Hodges]

You can make the Free Version of Zone Alarm work, by tweaking the security
settings, but then you are not fully protected.

See this article on zone labs site.
http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/support/techNote_9.jsp

Paul