Wireless Ad-Hoc networking puzzle

[Wickerman]

Hey All,

My brother and I recently came into the possession of 2 Actiontec USB 802.11b wireless cards and so set about trying to setup a Ad-Hoc wireless network so that we could share our meager 56k 'net connection (don't laugh!)

Unfortunately this has proved a very frustrating experience...

We installed the wireless cards upon both machines, downloaded the latest drivers for the cards and then ran the XP network wizard (my brothers machine has XP Pro, mine has XP Home).

At first everything worked fine - we could see eachothers network shares and I could surf the 'net from my computer. This lasted until I next started my computer. Upon restarting, the wireless network appeared on the taskbar insisting both cards were communicating yet I could not access my brothers network shares (I could see his computer though), I also could not access the internet (the internet connection was not present in the network connections screen as it was before I turned off my computer).

We tried running the XP network wizard again - first upon my brothers machine, and then upon mine. This did not seem to have any affect, even after a reboot. We tried uninstalling and then reinstalling the cards, then running the network wizard again - this displayed a 'Spooler subsystem app' crash on my computer and again did not help to re-establish the network (the crash now happens all the time when running the wizard...)

We are now totally out of ideas as to how to go about getting the network shares and internet sharing working again (and am totally confused about the crash)

If anyone has any pearls of wisdom to share we would love to hear them!

Thank you all for your time

:)

[2K2_Firehawk]

Wick, do you have WEP enabled or not? I had some issues getting an XP pro machine to talk to my AP after about a week or so. WEP knocks your throughoutput, and I personally think XP has an issue w signal strength detection. I have a PC that was set up with a Wireless G PCI card, and eventually wouldnt talk to the WAP b/c of key problems (I think XP wanted either a 5Bit or 40Bit key only?!) so I gave up and hard wired the sucker. However, my laptop with a Wireless G card will talk to the WAP until its blue in the face. If you have WEP enabled, try disabeling it and see what happens. Other than that, I'm not sure whats going on.

Good Luck

:)

[Greenstead]

I guess I have the opposite advice to suggest. Enable WEP on both PCs and try that. You should not need WEP enabled, but try it.

Why? Well, I don't really know. My network (mixed wired and wireless) has worked fine for a long long time until a few weeks ago when the wireless PCs refused to talk to each other although would appear in the workgroup. There seems a new authentication problem which I have not yet understood, but turning on WEP (which I have never used before) makes them happy and everything works as normal. It may be something to do with the recent flush of security updates issued by M$ - I dunno - yet.

[Wickerman]

Thanks for the swift reply guys - I'm pretty sure I've tried WEP on and off (infact, over the course of the past week, I'm pretty sure I've tried just about every combination of selected and unselected options!).

I did actually manage to get it working again last night (for a brief period of time atleast). I had tried manually assigning both computers IP addresses - the 'server' to 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2 for the client, along with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 for both. This did absolutely nothing so I set everything back to automatic, ran the network wizard first on my brothers machine and then upon mine - and it started working again. For about 20 minutes...

And so unless anyone else has any sudden flashes of inspiration, I'm going to do what I really should have done in the first place - get my hands on a very big drill, start punching holes through walls and install a wired network!

Now all I need to do is try and get my hands on an analog router (or atleast one with a serial port) that doesn't cost me the earth... Any ideas? (And upgrading to broadband/cable/dsl/satellite/courier pigeon is not an option - seems my road is a technological blackspot when it comes to highspeed 'net access. Although I could possibly get my hands on the pigeons...)

[Greenstead]

Well, a wired connection is always better than a wireless connection if you can provide it.

On the wireless probem...I don't think we have mentioned how important it is to ensure the firmware is the latest available. Ditto any XP updates.

[gorsesoft]

go into dos and type ipconfig. see what results you get. some times xp screws up the registry entries for the ipaddresses. make sure the 192.168.0.1 and 2 are actually assigned

[multiplexed]

I am running a similar setup (right down to sharing a 56k connection) and fought a similar problem for hours. The card was installed correctly and show up as connected, but I couldn't ping anything. It's like the connection was there, but not established.

The answer was sometimes, between shut downs you'll have to re-connect to the wireless network. On one of the machines, you have to right click on the wireless connect either in your tray or network control panel, then select "view wireless networks". Hit the connect button and you should be back in business.

Note these particular directions only apply towards windows xp built in wifi network support. Other os's will follow different directions as per their wireless gear setup, but the same concept.