anyone here familiar w/ internet sharing?

[luciusad2004]

Hey guys. I just moved my desktop upstairs and its to far away from the router to run a cable. I've been using internet connection sharing on my laptop to work as a makeshift wifi adapter but it seems to be acting strangely.

I had already had internet connection sharing enabled on my laptop because I use it to connect my xbox 360 to the network instead of paying 100 dollars for a usb adapter.

Here's what I find strange. My computer is running a fresh install of windows 7. I connect the ethernet cable between my windows 7 box and my laptop running windows xp. It works flawlessly and my win7 box is configured using DHCP.

Later I walk away and take my laptop downstairs w/out powering either machine off. I just unplug the network cable and go downstairs for about an hour. When I come back up the win7 box can't connect to the internet. I ran through the lil diagnostic program and it said the computer couldn't reach the DNS server.

I had to manually go in and edit the IPv4 settings and set a static IP and tell it were to find the DNS server. I had to do something similar w/ my xbox. But in the end I got it working.

• I made up and IP address along the lines of 192.168.0.xx
• Set the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0
• Set the default gateway to the static IP asigned to my ethernet port on my laptop.
• Lastly I set my DNS server to the address of my router/modem.

Everything works perfectly but it bothers me that I have to go through this when obviously DHCP should function. Does anyone know why DHCP would randomly stop working like this? I never have this problem when I fire up ubuntu on my PC. Is it a Microsoft networking thing? (hence the reason I have to use the same procedure on my xbox.)

[Crazy Buddhist]

Yes it's a microsoft thing. Specifically Vista. Turning off the wireless adapter on the laptop and turning it on again may have solved the issue.

You have done the best thing for a stable network however - I always use fixed IP addresses on my home network.

CB

[luciusad2004]

Yes it's a microsoft thing. Specifically Vista. Turning off the wireless adapter on the laptop and turning it on again may have solved the issue.

You have done the best thing for a stable network however - I always use fixed IP addresses on my home network.

CB

Cool, thanks for the insight