Hi Ben,
Key questions: how will you connect the directly-
connected machines to the gateway -- another network card
somewhere? A hub? Is it really mandatory that you use a
crossover cable between your local machines? Are static
IP's neccessary inside your network? If so, can they be
in the 192.168.0.* range or do they have to be in a pre-
determined domain?
If the answers to most of these questions is "I don't
really care, I just want it to work", I would start
your quest by first building a working local LAN and then
creating the gateway.
I'd suggest getting a cheap 4-port hub. Plug all three
machines into it, and verify that you have a LAN. Then
verify that the machine with the modem has a working Dial-
Up Connection.
You can configure your clients to use static IP addresses
at this point if you need them; but make sure you also
preassign the IP address associated to the gateway's LAN
connection (not its dial-up connection) in the same IP
domain as the clients. This is a good time to verify
that you have a working LAN (i.e. machines can see each
other in the windows workgroup, you have access to remote
disks and printers, etc.)
At this point you should be able to run the Home Network
Setup wizard on the gateway machine; and then run it on
the other machines. This will enable ICS on the gateway,
and it will set up the clients to use the gateway for all
network services.
I honestly don't know how you could utilize a Xover cable
between machine 2 and machine 3. The way I understand
it, there still would have to be a physical connection
from one of these client machines to the gateway, which
would require another network card on that client, which
would require a network bridge on that client; but a rule
of ICS is that a network bridge can only exist on the
gateway machine. Its a puzzle I can't solve.
GL.
/dave
