Can I make my old hub share an internet connection temporarily? PLEASE HELP!!

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Mizugori

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Mar 25, 2004
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I have an old hub. Now I have purchased a router but in the meantime, until it gets here, it would REALLY help me if I could share the internet between two PCs... they are both running windows xp. I have an old 8-port hub, and I am trying to make it act kind of as a router. Can I do this? Please can anyone help me get it set up? I tried putting an ethernet cable from my cable modem to port 1 on the hub, and a cable from port 2 to my desktop pc, and a cable from port 3 to my laptop. Now the funny thing is, the internet works on the desktop pc plugged into port two. but the laptop just says "this connection has limited or no connectivity." i tried it on port 4, in case port 3 was damaged or something, but same thing.

it seems to me that if the hub is someone getting the internet to and from my desktop, it clearly CAN work. but how do i make it share with the laptop??
 
You must have a router.

If you have two NIC's in your desktop you could enable internet sharing on it and connect your laptop to the desktop. Search these forums for more details on internet sharing in XP - Lord knows the topic has been beat to death here.
 
if i can just do that, is there any advantage to having a router rather than just having an extra nic or two in my computer and using the internet sharing?
 
Mizugori said:
if i can just do that, is there any advantage to having a router rather than just having an extra nic or two in my computer and using the internet sharing?
Click to expand...

Well one thing is the computer that is sharing the internet has to be on all the time if you want to be able to connect from the other one. Also bandwidth might be an issue if you download/play games a lot on both.
 
Another problem you're running into is that you need to assign static IP addresses to each system. Make sure that the IPs you assign are all on the same network (something like 192.168.1.1, 192.168.1.2, 192.168.1.3).

Having IPs all on the same network will get you going for your LAN, but you still need some kind of gateway to hit the outside. ICS will probably work for this, but you really just need to get a router. They're incredibly cheap nowadays and incredibly easy to setup. While you're getting a router, make sure you get one with a switch so you don't have to worry about colliding packets.
 
Only way you can use a Hub/Switch is if your ISP will give you more than one IP address, My ISP gives me 4, Ihave 3 computers hooked up via switch to my modem.

You won't have to Assign IPs manually if you use your computer as a router, it will use DHCP if you use the network setup wizard which is really easy to do. plug the modem into one NIC, your hub into a second Nic, the other computers into the hub. in the network setup wizard there will be an option something like, "This computer connects directly to the internet, the other computers on this network will connect thru this computer" Select that option, the rest is self explanatory. on the other computers run the wizard and select " this computer connects thru another computer or thru a residintial gateway..." turn everything off for short time, start modem, start main computer, then start the other computers and all should be fine.

Like one poster said the downside to this is that in order for the "Other" computers to get internet then the Main PC must be on.
 
Mizugori said:
if i can just do that, is there any advantage to having a router rather than just having an extra nic or two in my computer and using the internet sharing?
Click to expand...

Hardware firewall protection with a router. Resource hogging software firewall your only option if you're using software means such as ICS.
 
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