Networking Problem

[Thomas M]

I wasn't sure which group to post this question in, but I thought that this
group was about the closest fit with my problem.

I have two machines on a small home network that share an Internet
connection. I'll refer to these computers as machine A and machine B.
Machine A is running Windows 2000 SP4 and Norton Internet Security 2005 with
the firewall enabled. Machine B is running Windows XP SP2. Here's how the
network is setup.

Internet > Machine A > Wireless router > Switch > Machine B

This has worked without any problem for about a year. Last week I was
browsing a newsgroup on machine B when the connection got dropped, and I
have not been able to re-establish an Internet connection from machine B
since. However, machine A still connects without a problem via an internal
DSL modem that is connected directly to the wall jack. The Internet
connection on machine A is shared out.

My first thought was that one of the NICs had gone out. So I tried a couple
of pings from machine A and found that I could ping machine B and the
router. I then switched to machine B and found that I could ping the
router, but that I was NOT able to ping machine A. This made me think that
the problem was with the firewall. I disabled the firewall and found that
machine B can ping machine A when the firewall is turned off. However,
machine B still will not connect to the Internet.

Since I can ping between machines, and both machines can access the router
configuration page, it's clear to me that both NICs are working properly.
The fact that I can turn off the firewall and still not be able to connect
machine B to the Internet tells me that it's not a firewall problem.

I then started to focus on the switch and router. First, I bypassed the
switch entirely by connecting machine B directly to the router. This made
no difference. I switched around ports on the router thinking that maybe a
port had gone bad, but that did not make a different either. I then cycled
both the switch and the router, and I reset the router configuration to the
factory defaults. Again, no difference.

Nothing changed on either computer at the time that this problem first
occurred. Neither machine has contracted a virus, I hadn't installed or
removed anything, etc. It seems to have simply broken on the fly. Maybe a
corrupt driver or something. Short of recreating the Internet connection
and reinstalling Norton Internet Security, both of which I don't want to do
because they were a pain in the ass to get working the first time, I'm out
of ideas.

Any suggestions that you can offer will be greatly appreciated.

--Tom

 

[Guest]

...and reinstalling Norton Internet Security, ... which I don't want to do

I'd be inclined to try removing it. Windows Firewall is adequate, if you
want a better one, try Kerio.

 

[Millybags]

Why no


!-------!------------Machine A
Internet-----!Router!
!-------!------------Machine B


That's how mine works.

Steve

 

[Thomas M]

That's the way that I would like to do it eventually. However, my DSL modem
is a PCI card, so it has to be installed in a computer. In other words, I
don't have the hard ware to connect the router directly to the wall
jack--the connection has to go through machine A.

My current setup evolved. Initially, it was just machine A with an internal
DSL modem that was networked to a Win98 machine through a switch. I shared
out the Internet connection on machine A so that the Win98 machine could
reach the Internet.

Later, I added a Windows server (this is machine B in my question). This
machine was purchased so that I could play around with Windows 2003 Server.
At the moment, however, I have Windows XP installed on the machine, so I
don't have it setup as a domain server, or even a file server. In fact,
it's not always on. For this reason, I didn't want machine B to be the
gateway, so I connected it as if it's just a regular workstation (which it
is right now). That allowed me to experiment with Windows 2003 Server and
have connectivity to the Internet without requiring the machine to be on in
order for the other machines to use the Internet.

Finally, my sister and her family stayed with us last year and they
purchased the wireless router. This is not the router that I personally
would have purchased, but it's not bad and they gave it to us as thanks for
letting them bunk at our place for a while, so the price was right! The
router does not have enough ports for all my devices, so I plugged the
switch into one of the router ports to enable Internet connectivity from
multiple machines via one router port.

Not an ideal setup, I will admit, but I've decided to keep it this way for
now because I don't want to invest in additional equipment at the moment.

--Tom