56k dial up on laptop 802.11G ?

Jul 23, 2005 121 Replies

Buy just about any AP. Connect it to your wired LAN. Done!

(Whatever host on your LAN actually has the modem must also be able to do IP forwarding, and obviously should already have a firewall.)

I'm glad you said simple and not cheap. Look for a "LAN Modem" or similar device. That's a misnamed NAT router conglomerated with a 56K dialup modem. Some examples are 3Com 3C886, 3C886A, and 3C888. I use these as backup for when the DSL or T1 goes down (or someone forgot to pay the bill). They can be found on eBay for about $50-$100.

There's also the Multitech Proxy Server and their Dialup Router:

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can't find anything on the Proxy Server as it's obsolete. There are several models, one of which uses an external modem.

Where's also a collection of products made by WebRamp. The company is long gone, but the really crappy products are still floating around eBay. Avoid unless you're cheap, desperate, or have masochistic tendencies. To get wireless, you take either an access point (i.e. no router), or a wireless router with the router section disabled and running as an access point, and plug it into one of the LAN ports on the LAN modem.

The one he either has or is going to create.

Then he simply needs to add one. Since any old desktop will do, it wouldn't cost as much as the AP.

"bumtracks" wrote in news:WBsEe.1975$sc3.295@trnddc07:

I would say get a dial-up NAT router that has wireless abilities. But manufactures seem to be abonding this dial-up period. Maybe, you can find one or a discontinued line for a all wired or wire/wireless router. If you can find a dial-up wire router, you can plug a WAP G device into it and have wireless. An outdate or discontinued dial-up wireless router my or may have *G*.

You could also get two wireless NIC's and put one into a computer that has the dial-up connection and use ICS with two NIC(s) in AD-HOC mode.

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Duane :)

Something like this?

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I think one of the apple airport acess points has a built in modem. If you have another computer in the house that is connected to a modem and a wireless access point, then you should be able to connect via that computer with it running a nat or proxy program.

What LAN?

He didn't say he had another machine.

Cheaper and less hassle to buy a box.

Then he needs to add a legal OS and configure it and it's starting to sound more expensive again and a load of hassle (don't go throwing in Linux as a suggestion because he hasn't said whether he's a linux expert and if he's not then configuring that could prove frustrating).

Reading between the lines, I think he wanted a no-hassle solution to run a laptop wirelessly.

:)

David.

Which requires a second computer...

The other way is to use any serial type modem and connect that to a router which uses the serial port as backup to the Ethernet WAN connection. In this case you dont have broadband WAN so the unit will use the dial up modem. Once you have a proper router the world is your oyster including adding wireless Try this one.

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Remember though, all those little programs like MSN which continually transmit data and so could run up your phone bill. Enable so timeout controls

Tony

Retch. ICS sucks.

If you're gonna advocate adding a computah to do the job of a modem router, then at least use software that's suitable for the purpose. There are plenty of stand along Linux based router packages available. I use Freesco for the purpose:

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on a floppy or Compact Flash card. There are better packages around, but this was the one I used first and like.

I've built 2 hot spots using Freesco as a router. The major advantage is the ability to have multiple independent ethernet ports with independent routeing rules for keeping multiple shared customers seperate. In the bad old days, before we got DSL and cable modems in the area, I had companies sharing a modem dialup or ISDN dialup using Freesco routers. Most were built on 486DX2/66 with 16MB and booting from a CF card.

Internet Connection Sharing.

Barry ===== Home page

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Put zone alarm on the laptop and stop that pesky calling home.

Searching Google for "ics sucks", I get 240 hits. "ICS fails" adds another 198 and "ics problem" adds 4450 hits. Not really a huge number, but enough to indicate a trend.

The problem that bugs me most is that ICS drops oversized packets in W2K. It seems to get it right in XP, but if you have 802.1q VLAN packets running, you need to shrink the MTU a few bytes on every ICS client workstation to get it to stop dropping packets. MTU discovery would normally find and fix this automagically, but ICS apparently doesn't support MTU discovery.

There are also some limitations as to what you can do with ICS in terms of port forwarding and port triggering. ICS does not block anything by default and really needs an additional firewall in front of it to handle the port forwarding. I've had excessive entertainment using ICS in conjunction with various firewall products (Kerio, Norton, McAfee, etc). Most of these have special instructions for making them work with ICS.

I've crashed ICS with a pair of gigabit ethernet cards running full blast, but that's expecting a bit much. ICS is fine for a modem or typical DSL. I've also found weird network problems (sorry, forgot the details) when ICS is installed, but not being used.

It's not that ICS is defective or broken. It mostly works. It's that there are so many better proxy, NAT, Linux, and hardware solutions that work much better and easier than ICS.

If I have to use a PC for sharing a connection, I like to use:

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too lacks features and requires a firewall to protect the system, but it's free and it works.

You are absolutely right. The OP could probably find one that someone is throwing in the trash that would be far more than is needed for a firewall. And despite what David thinks, booting up a Linux firewall is pretty darned easy (e.g., every Linksys WRT54G does it in about 7 seconds).

Total cost: $0.

Where in the specification of the question does it say that adding a second computer isn't a problem? :)

Which is not a problem.

Barry ===== Home page

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In what way? Worked OK for me.

Barry ===== Home page

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The Linksys WRT54G series of wireless routers all have firewall software.

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