Routing between lans with windows 2000

[liliafan]

Hi

I am not sure if anyone can help with this is it a pretty big problem.

Basically I have just moved my home office to my garage, in order to link to the dsl router in the house I have upgraded the router to a linksys wireless router.

I have a machine in the garage with windows 2000 advanced server installed, I want to use this machine as a gateway between the machines in the garage and the router in the house.

I have set up the machine with a 802.11g wireless pci card which is connected just fine to the router in the house, and a 10/100 ethernet card which is connected to the switch in the shed which all the machines are linked to.

Now I want all the machines in the garage to use the windows 2000 gateway to link to the dsl router.

I have tried using 2 distinct networks:

192.168.1.0 / 255.255.255.0 in the house
192.168.0.0 / 255.255.255.0 in the garage

I then set up all my machines in the shed on the 192.168.1.0 subnet with a gateway set as 192.168.0.1 (the windows 2000 machine) I also installed the windows routing and remote access in the 2000 machine, and set the registry to enableipforward. This failed.

I tried to have both networks on the same subnet this failed.

I tried setting static routes to 0.0.0.0 / 255.255.255.0 on interface 2 (ethernet) to use the gateway 192.168.1.50 (wireless route) this failed.

I have tried combinations of all the above and everything failed, none of the other machines in the garage can get a connection to the router in the house.

All suggestions would help.

Thanks
Ben

[feigned]

I assume you're using RRAS in Advanced Server to do this, right?

See here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q299801

A little less cryptic:
http://www.certificationsuccess.com/index.cfm?pageid=269

Windows 2000 sucks for IP Forwarding. Using RRAS only attempts to change the registry value. If it cannot write to the registry, then the setting wouldn't enable. Give manually setting this value a try and see if it works (who knows, it's windows right?)

The key is:
REG_DWORD HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\IPEnableRouter = 1

[liliafan]

REG_DWORD HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\IPEnableRouter = 1

Hey TKS, I have already set the registry values, that was the first thing I did, but still it isn't working.

feigned I just printed the 2 reference links you gave me I am going to try that now.

I miss linux, I set up ip forwarding in 20 minutes before, but unfortunatly the wireless card I have doesn't support linux properly, even using the linixant driverloader, the best connection I can get is 11mbps which on a wireless-g card is terrible, so I am left having to fight against windows.

Thanks both of you for the advice.

Ben

[feigned]

Yeah, I've heard that linux isn't quite "with it" when it comes to the wireless side of things.

It is just basic NAT though.

[liliafan]

Yeah, I've heard that linux isn't quite "with it" when it comes to the wireless side of things.

It is just basic NAT though.

Feigned excellent links :-) I had been working on it all day yesterday, today I followed the instructions on those pages and it was up and running within 30 minutes.

Linux is lacking behind in wireless networking only because the hardware vendors don't release drivers for linux and it is up to the linux community to produce their own drivers which obviously takes a little time, for them to figure out the hardware etc, however, if you can get the drivers in my personal opinion (personal tastes do vary) linux provides a more stable and easier interface to this kind of task.

Anyway thanks again for the help

Ben

[alc6379]

...Have you thought about bridging, as opposed to routing?

With bridging, you join to segments together, sort of like a router. But, with a bridge, you can have all of the machines on the same logical subnet.

The cool thing about it is that you don't have to tell the machines on the LAN about the bridge-- it's all transparent. If you're worried about network traffic, all of your traffic would be kept in the garage, seperated from the rest of the house.

Linux can do this, any *BSD can do it, and Windows 2000/XP can do it, too.

[feigned]

...Have you thought about bridging, as opposed to routing?

With bridging, you join to segments together, sort of like a router. But, with a bridge, you can have all of the machines on the same logical subnet.

The cool thing about it is that you don't have to tell the machines on the LAN about the bridge-- it's all transparent. If you're worried about network traffic, all of your traffic would be kept in the garage, seperated from the rest of the house.

Linux can do this, any *BSD can do it, and Windows 2000/XP can do it, too.

2000 cannot, but XP and 2k3 can. I'm not hip with the alternative OS's (just cutting my teeth), but that's a good bit of info.

[alc6379]

2000 cannot, but XP and 2k3 can. I'm not hip with the alternative OS's (just cutting my teeth), but that's a good bit of info.

Interesting... could have sworn 2000 could do it...

What model Wireless NIC do you have, liliafan? Linux or a *BSD might have okay support for it.

[DMR]

Interesting... could have sworn 2000 could do it...

I don't think so Alex- I think feigned is right about that one.

(Of course, what do I know, spending most of my waking hours in Linux-Land as I do... :mrgreen: )

[liliafan]

Interesting... could have sworn 2000 could do it...

What model Wireless NIC do you have, liliafan? Linux or a *BSD might have okay support for it.

I have a linksys WMP59G (I think that is the code, I don't have the spec in front of my right now) and no linux doesn't support it but linuxant driverloader is supposed to support it, but I did quite a bit of testing with the linuxant drivers and a whole bunch of hacking with configs and stuff but it would only operate as a 802.11b card which gave me a max throughput of 11mbps using windows 2000 (as much as a hate to my home is almost 100% linux) I can get it operating as a 802.11g card with a throughput of about 45mbps at this range.

I couldn't find any documentation on whether *BSD would support it.

I will take a look at bridging, I have windows XP and windows 2003 available, and I was planning on messing with the router box in a couple of days anyway so I will experiment do you have any good links on how to set up bridging?

Thanks

Ben

[alc6379]

Have you thought about FreeBSD for the router?

FreeBSD has a project called NDISulator (aka Proiject Evil) that tries to adapt Windows wireless drivers to FreeBSD. I've got an ADMtek 8211 chipset card which has no native driver, but works great with NDISulator.

[liliafan]

Have you thought about FreeBSD for the router?

FreeBSD has a project called NDISulator (aka Proiject Evil) that tries to adapt Windows wireless drivers to FreeBSD. I've got an ADMtek 8211 chipset card which has no native driver, but works great with NDISulator.

Hmmm I would love to use a Unix to do my routing, I am somewhat of a windows hater, do you have a link to where I can read up more on NDISulator? It sounds pretty interesting, also is it just freeBSD specific or do you know if openBSD supports it, that is my *nix of choice.

Thanks

Ben

[alc6379]

It's FreeBSD specific, AFAIK.

I can't really point you to a good tutorial on it-- the FreeBSD mailing lists have been pretty chatty about it, though.

Check out this Google search for NDISulator I believe I found a HOWTO on using it there, written by Bill Paul, the creator of NDISulator. If you're interested in running it, keep in mind that you want to run at least FreeBSD 5.2.1 RELEASE, or even better, FreeBSD 5-CURRENT, for best results.

[liliafan]

alc6379 - I finally have a couple of quite days ahead, so I downloaded freebsd 5.2.1 (most recent I had before was 5.1), and I am going to try using NDISulator, and see if I can get it working, if you have any tips on configuring it please feel free to send them ;-) I looked on google but I couldn't find anything worthwhile, no sign of that how to, I can gonna try and bluff my way through and see how that goes it usually works.

Thanks for the advice, oh btw I tried the bridging with win 2003 and decided I really don't like 2003 period which is why I am attempting to get the card working with bsd.

Thanks
Ben

[alc6379]

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hardware/2004-January/001005.html

This list message actually describes the process of making an NDISulator driver from the .inf and the .sys files included with your NIC driver. I actually had to do a search for it using the term "Project Evil"-- it showed right up then.

If you need any help on bridging, check out the FreeBSD handbook on bridging:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-bridging.html

[liliafan]

acl6379 - Okay I managed to get freebsd 5.2-Current up and running which is cool I managed to get project evil up and running, however, I can't assign and ipv4 address assigned to the card:

ifconfig ndis0 inet 192.168.1.50 netmask 255.255.255.0 ssid default wepmode on wepkey 0x(key)

when I do an ifconfig ndis0 the inet address is missing but the inet6 address is there.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Ben