Broadband AOL and Linksys WRT54G

[-Sean Casey]

First off... I hate AOL, always have, always will, but the person I am helping refuses to get rid of it because they think it is more "convienent" than a real ISP.

Anyhow, this person has AOL broadband and wanted to add a wireless network to his home. Ok no big deal, we get a Linksys WRT54G since I know he does not have a router or anything beyond the XP SP2 firewall.

So I first try setting it up like I would on a regular network, but of course it wont authenticate with AOL.

Then I decide to forget trying to secure the desktop computer, threw a second NIC in the computer and tried to configure ICS. Well I tested it, and ICS is working and packets are getting routed. The problem is the AOL creates a hidden PPP WAN miniport that I can not use ICS over (does not show up in Network Connections except for a brief second when connecting or disconnecting). So the computer is routing from one NIC to the other like it should with ICS on, but it is not using the AOL connection. So basically it does not work.

Any suggestions? I think if I could turn ICS on on the PPP WAN Miniport (I'm guessing this is just the PPoE driver) that it would work, but with it hidden I don't see that happening easily.

 

[artimasz]

AOL is really not uniform in this regard. it really depends on who is providing the actual DSL connection.

Sometimes you can use regular PPPoE on the router or miniport on XP like:

[email protected]/password

if the dsl provider have them statically routed to the aol edge device then you would peobably need to auth with america online/no password, yes there is a space.

some routers don't like the space, some routers like linksys have firmware you can download that will actually include aol dsl as an option alongside pppoe/pptp/heart/ et cetera.

don't ask me how i know this.

also is you have 9.0 SE you could probably use port magic to automatically do this for you IF ITS A NEW NETWORK. if it's a pre-existing network, it will mess it up.

 

[-Sean Casey]

Thanks for the info. I found some additional help on Linksys's site. Not sure why I didn't check there to begin with. Hopefully this works out!