Since I haven't had any luck with my internet connection sharing problem which i posted previously, due to the terrible quality of service here, i've decided a second connection may be the answer.
I won't give up the cable because i also have 2 phone lines on it, plus cable tv, but I will get a 256K DSL connection in addition to my 128K cable. The benefits of this will be that it's double, plus i'll get the full 256K connection for myself without having to share it with other users. (I explained previously about the 10to1 ratio used here in pakistan)
My question is: (let's say there are 10 computers) How can I have them all networked and sharing files, but having 2 internet connections, and restricting 5 computers to the cable, and the other 5 to the DSL. I'll have a computer being the host for the cable, and another being the host for the DSL. Otherwise, am I stuck with having to buy a router for the DSL, and a second network card and consequent cabling for each computer i want to use DSL for?
My worries stem from them fact that the cable is unlimited, but the DSL is capped at 2Gb per month. Since i usually download that much in 3 or 4 days, i'll easily end up paying 10 times as much as the monthly line rental costs unless i can stop the computer for accessing that particular shared connection, and the computer will automatically choose that connection because it'll be much faster, or even because the cable is so slow sometimes it doesn't register as an internet connection.
To complicate matters more, i'll need to add a wireless network, over which the laptops will be able to access only the cable, when it's working.

Ouch ! Starts being complicated.
Need a drawing.
What do you have now, howe are your computers currently connected ?
with nic cards ? All of them to a single switch, or do you have two switches?
If you have two switches everything is simple...

You need three seperate IP domains or three seperate IP ranges. You'll need to set your subnet masks so five computers access one gateway, five computers access the other gateway and all computers can access each other. For example, the DSL can be 192.168.1.1, the cable can 192.168.1.254, and the subnet masks can be 255.255.255.XX, where XX is the subnet filter to restrict one gateway or the other and the computers would have IP addresses in the range of 192.168.1.120 to 130 and the subnet masks would overlap in this range. You'd need your network guru to figure out the best subnet masks to use.

You'd best be off though, using one of the computers as a server and save all the grief.

Sorry people. my connection's been down for over a week. i'll try to get up a drawing of how i envision it being.

Yaar You'll have to subnet your Major Ip address in order to share files and other devices on the Network.
+ you'll have been given a certain number of IP addresses you can use.
Problem is How do you make subnet masks work?
There are basically 3 Class. You should have known class A class B and CLass C
I think i'll have to teach you how to design Subnets

Listen Graffiti As u know IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique identifier for a node or host connection on an IP network. An IP address is a 32 bit binary number usually represented as 4 decimal values, each representing 8 bits, in the range 0 to 255 (known as octets) separated by decimal points. This is known as "dotted decimal" notation ok.
Here is an Example 140.179.220.200

Every Single IP address consists of two parts.. one identifying the network and one identifying the node...OK The Class of the address and the subnet mask determine which part belongs to the network address and which part belongs to the node address.

There are 5 different address classes. you can determine which class any IP address is in by examining the first 4 bits of the IP address.
Class A addresses begin with 0xxx, or 1 to 126 decimal.
Class B addresses begin with 10xx, or 128 to 191 decimal.
Class C addresses begin with 110x, or 192 to 223 decimal.
Class D addresses begin with 1110, or 224 to 239 decimal.
Class E addresses begin with 1111, or 240 to 254 decimal. You cant use this Class ok

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thanx, hellraiser. I'll definitely look up that site. Hopefully in conjunction with what i find out and whatever expertise the techs here have, i should be able to sort it out then. See, the problem here is finding someone who actually knows what they're talking about. I'm not trying to be real negative about Pakistan, don't get me wrong, and i'm sure there are a lot of capable people. just probably they're all outside the country so they can get a decent salary. Really, how it is here is if i ever do call a tech support person either over the phone or to come over to my house, whether it's for internet problems, software problems, or hardware, 9 times out of 10, what happens is the guy sits down, i explain the problem and why it's a problem, and then he tells me i'm probably right, but there's no solution (because he doesn't know of it) and so i end up online trying to figure it out somehow. They just have their preconfigured responses but can't think outside of the box.
Newayz, just because some were asking for a visual of my plans, here is how it is now:

and how i plan for it to be is:

with of course all computers sharing files, but with the 3 in red barred from using the shared DSL connection. My brother also had some input: First of all you can't, or shouldn't, have two ICS comps on the same network. The hub doesn't divide them, it joins them all as one, as I'm sure you know. When you enable ICS on a pc, this is what happens: it assigns itself the 192.168.0.1 ip address and becomes a DHCP server for the 192.168.0.x range. You can't have two comps on the same network wit the same IP (which is what will happen if you enable ICS on two comps), and you can't have two DHCP servers on the same network, or rather you can but not the ICS type, as you can't control them.

It would be simple enough to make comps choose a certain comp for internet access - just change the client's default gateway to whatever exit point you want them to use. Though if you don't have a real DHCP server, you'd have to configure the ip settings manually. Which is simply setting up static IP addresses.

The default gateway is what the client will use whenever it needs to go somewhere ouside of its network, if it doesn't already have a preconfigured route for it. So if your client wants to go to 123.45.67.89, which is outside your network, it will send its request to the default gateway. So all you have to do is tell the client which default gateway you want it to use.

But as I said, it won't work in your scenario because you can't have two ICS comps on the same network.

Does that sound correct?

One possibility (but I'm not sure this would work, you'd have to try it) would be to do it like this:

(We'll call the two ICS comps ICSdsl and ICScable)


Get all your "normal" client computers and assign them all static IP addresses, starting from 192.168.0.2, 192.168.0.3, 192.168.0.4, etc.
Assign the other three clients IPs starting from 192.168.0.101 (just to avoid confusion).

Give all the normal clients a default gateway of 192.168.0.1, but for the three clients that shouldn't access the DSL connection, give them a default gateway of 192.168.0.100.

All the clients should have a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.

All the clients should have their respective default gateway as their preferred DNS server. IOW, assign the normal clients a preferred DNS server address of 192.168.0.1, and for the other three clients, give them the 192.168.0.100.



Enable ICS on first ICSdsl and then ICScable.

Then open the TCP/IP properties for the internal NIC (the one that will do the sharing - the one that has the 192.168.0.1 IP) of ICScable, and assign it an IP address of 192.168.0.100.

When you enable ICS on ICScable, you will likely get an error msg that says "There is an IP address conflict". It should go away when you change the IP address to 192.168.0.100



And that's about that. Obviously you could have problems with any other devices you attach that use a dynamic IP; you'd also have to configure them statically, or else you will get IP conflicts (two DHCP servers handing out same IPs).

Let me know how you get on.

This post has been edited by eurotrash: Jun 27 2006, 11:47 AM