Network with ethernet connection?

[marvin]

This is probably going to come across as a stupid newbie question.

Anyway I'm in a college dorm with what I assume is a 100 MBp/s ethernet connection. Is it possible to network the 2 pcs togther and use internet connection sharing on one of them so that the two PCs can use the internet?

I've looked through the tutorial here, but all it mentions is cable modems and dsl modems.

Oh and do I need crossover cable to network the pcs togther?

Thanks,
Neil

[Greenstead]

You do need a cross over cable to connect the PCs.

I don't think you can use ICS to share the connection (I never tried it).

If one of the PCs is XP you can bridge the connection from the network to the other PC and it will have access to the network.

Alternatively buy a cheap 10/100 hub or switch and plug the PCs into it.

[marvin]

Thanks for the reply.

Will the hub solution work even if I only have one IP address allocated to me by the college network?

[Greenstead]

No it would not.

I would be surprised if they are giving you a fixed IP address to use - I guess its possible. I would expect they have a DHCP server and allocate IPs automatically to anyone who plugs into the network - then the hub works.

[bigboom]

I have a similar situation. I have one computer running XP pro, connected to a wireless router. The wireless router is connected to a DSL router accessing the internet. This computer running XP pro has both a wireless adapter, and a NIC card. Currently, this computer has no problem accessing the internet through the wireless adapter, and is assigned an IP address by the wireless router.

Next, I have a laptop running W2K pro. I want to use a cross over cable to connect the XP computer's NIC card to the laptop's NIC card in order to enable the laptop to access the internet using the XP pro's wireless connection.

Greenstead, you mentioned that it's possible to do this on the XP computer by setting up a network bridge. I tried to do this, but could not get the setup to operate correctly. My XP computer ends up not being able to ping the wireless router.

I'm a newbie, never used a cross over cable before. Any help would be much appreciated!!!

[kabir]

it is posible to connect two pc using a cross over cable and share the internet, it just requires you to change the IP setting on the two networks.

so the internet runs from the host computer and the clients runs from the host.