ethernet & wireless on the same PC

It is not clear to me how I would enable or disable the ethernet or wireless card in Win98se. Anyone know?

My wireless card has an IP address of 192.168.0.4, which is a reasonable address considering the rest of my LAN. I can use winipcfg to release it and renew it, so I know I am capable of talking to the router. I know it is coming in wirelessly, because I have the ethernet cable disconnected.

Howard

Howard Delman wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

All I ever did was enable or disable the wire or wireless NIC on my laptop through the Winddow XP O/S. If I was using the wire NIC, I would enable it and disable the wireless NIC. You should be able to do the same on the Win 9'x O/S I would think.

What do you mean you have been given and valid IP but you cannot connect to it? What IP is it? If the IP starts with 169, then the machine doesn't have an IP that is going to allow it to connect to the Internet.

Just what do you mean by this IP that you're getting?

Duane :)

there is still a 98 machine out there???

Go to the Device Manager to enable/disable the NIC card.

The only easy way to get a 98 machine with both NIC and wireless, to work on the wireless is to disable the NIC card. In XP I use a nic and wireless on one machine (laptop) and simply unplug the nic when I plug in the wireless card. For some reason, that does not work as well in 98 and the only way is to use the wireless is to disable the nic in the device manager.

Good Luck!

neo

if the nic/wireless cards are one the same network, the computer gets confused as to which nic to use.

put the wireless nics on the 192.168.1.0 network, the cabled nics on the

10.0.0.0 network and make good use of your hosts file.

works a treat for me.

Howard Delman wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

I would assume you would go to Control Panel/Network Connections and right- click the LAN icon for the NIC -- Enable or Disable. I am not sure it was the late 1990's that I last saw a Win 9'x O/S.

Duane :)

If they're both on the same network, the PC just consults the routing table same as always. The NIC with the lowest metric is chosen and that's normally the wire connected NIC.

Do an ROUTE PRINT to display your routing table and if the wrong NIC has the lower metric then you can adjust that in the advanced properties for that NIC.

No confusion at all.

David.

Heavens, yes. There will be until my wife's machine kicks the bucket, or hell freezes over (ie, when she finally lets me install linux on it).

then why doesn't his p.c. work?

PC's don't get confused, they make logical decisions based on configuration information.

When he posts his routing table we might know, until then we will just have to wait and see! :)

David.

if the o.p. _hasn't_ done what you described (i.e. adjust the metric in advanced properties), both nics would have the same metric. would the computer get "confused" as to which nic to use?

Nope, try it and see. Just fire them both up and do a route print. Windows allocates a metric automatically.

No confusion. :)

oh. right. never knew that. i usually use linux and if both wireless and cabled nics are up, i get no internet connectivity. i have to 'ifdown' one of the nics.

here's what the command "route" produces:

rimmer:~# route Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface

192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 wlan0 192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 default 192.168.1.254 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0 default 192.168.1.254 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 wlan0

i get two default routes... "confuses" the computer!

unlike me, you mean :-)

Thanks to all who took the time to reply, and discuss, my situation.

I solve the problem by going into device manager, and disabling one of the two network cards. I am now running wireless, and the NIC is disabled. When I wanted to try going back to ethernet, I disabled the wireless card, and reenabled the NIC. Since I won't be changing very often, or if ever, this is a reasonable solution for me.

Thanks again, Howard

Windoze 98SE isn't terribly smart about automatically switching network connections. It usually grabs the first one that can deliver a DHCP address and sticks with it. It's not really Microsoft's fault because nobody ever really anticipated having two possible paths to the same IP address (via ethernet and wireless). For Windoze XP, MS introduces automagic metric juggling. Toshiba laptops come with a system tray utility that handles the switching automatically. There are also manual utilities such as Netswitcher:

can handle multiple configurations. You can also use the Windoze "system profile" on bootup to handle different configurations.

Let me guess. Your laptop runs Windoze XP, which might explain why it switches correctly and your Win98SE desktop does not.

Ah well when whoever is coding that bit of Linux this week finally catches up with Microsoft, maybe they'll copy the logic and get it right!

Well you see, that's the thing with Linux, it's supposed to play dumb so that it gives the opportunity for the user to show how expert they are at dominating it.

:)

David.

Linux has never, ime, permitted a second default route, so there's a bug there. However, it's true that it doesn't attempt to set preferential metrics. That's up to the user to determine.

i must be some sort of |_337 |-|4>