Home Network - Tough Riddle

[pizza]

Hi there,

I have problems setting up my home wireless network. I tried searching this forum for similar problems but I had no luck. Any help is much, much appreciated. I am a novice, so please be gentle :)


THE SETTING
-----------
My desktop (Win XP Professional) is connected to the internet through an ADSL modem. It works fine.
My laptop (Win XP Home) has a wireless network card (Netgear MA521, 802.11b), and so has the desktop (Netgear WG311, 802.11g).
I managed to set up and connect the two network cards in Ad Hoc mode - I gave up with Infrastructure mode. Note that I had to disable the Wireless Zero Configuration service on the desktop to make this work. The connection at the lower layers seems to be fine, as the signal strength varies from good to excellent.
I also managed to set up the TCP/IP configuration of both machines so they could ping each other. Good.


THE GOAL
--------

I would like to do something more exciting than just pinging.
Namely: Printer and file system sharing, ICS, Remote Desktop (from laptop to desktop only of course).


THE PROBLEMS
------------

When I tried to share the printer, which is physically connected to the desktop, the Microsoft network configuration machinery started up, and I followed the obvious options for my configuration. No sweat.
I did the same on the laptop (netstart.exe? Can't remember the name), clearly choosing different options.
This changed the TCP/IP configuration of both ends, adding a bridge on the laptop and assigning its address automatically.
Now the two boxes have incredibly high pings. Before netstart, the response was mostly below 10ms, very rarely above 100ms. Now it times out or is in the thousands of milliseconds. Note though that this might be a red herring, because I didn't test ping thoroughly beforehand, and I've also seen bursts of low pings afterwards.
Anyway, doing anything else (e.g. web or remote desktop) is obviously suicide-slow.


OTHER CLUES
-----------

- With exactly the same hardware and same location I used to be able to connect and copy across large files. The "only" thing that changed was that I have installed XP Pro on a clean Hard Disk on the Desktop - it used to be Win98SE.
- I have occasional problems at the physical level, but I'm pretty sure that this is as good as it gets and it's not responsible for the TCP/IP problems I'm getting. I say this because ping responses are the same whether I have "very low" or "excellent" signal. Anyway, low-level problems include:
- Signal strength is very volatile, occasionally disconnecting - especially on the desktop side.
- Sometimes the "site survey" on the desktop displays 2 connections, 1 ad-hoc and 1 infrastructure, and sometimes the MAC address changes. Anyway, no matter what I connect to, no matter which channel I choose, no matter the signal, no matter what I do the ping result is the same.

I'm rather depressed. Any ideas?

If you can think of a forum that would be better suited than this please shout.
Again, thank you very much for your help.

Regards,
Giulio


P.S.: No thanks to Netgear helpdesk.

[get.Mos]

maybe i missed this... do you have a wireless router in place? (the modem should be connected to a router.)

[pizza]

No router, no.
Config is very simple:

Laptop<->wirelessCard<- . . . ->wirelessCard<->Desktop<->ADSLModem<- . . . ->Internet

Thank you,
Giulio

[tumpy]

Originally posted by pizza
No router, no.
Config is very simple:

Laptop<->wirelessCard<- . . . ->wirelessCard<->Desktop<->ADSLModem<- . . . ->Internet

Thank you,
Giulio If you don't have a wireless router how can two radio wireless (cards) see each other and see the ADSL modem..

[asitech]

Hello,

First of all let me congratualte you for able to describe your problem clearly, you can be technical writer...

Getting back to the problem:

Higher ping times, could be becasue of both wireless devices loosing connectivity and trying re-establish it and going through the whole process again and again...this is typical symptem of jamming a network...

* Turn off radio on your desktop or turn off desktop and see if your laptop can see any other AP in your site survey tool
* Instead of letting your software assign you an ip address, you assign an ip address manually to both your desktop wrieless card and your laptop.
* Try forcing both devices to connect at lower speeds say 1.0 Mbps or 2.0 Mbps instead of auto mode.

Keep cell phones and cordless phones away from your radio. Dont turn your microwave owen on while testing...

Good luck.

[modgeek2003]

Well what I would do to simplify you net work is , spend not to much ,but get yourself a router and a switch, both the same speed, preferably gigabit.

Get ris of the wireles card in the desktop, and install a second nic card ( gigabit to match the speed of the switch)

Run your ADSL to the modem , then modem threw the router to the first nic card. From nic 2, run that to a switch. Then from the switch run a cable to a small wireless acess point, like dlink Air wireless access point. On the access point set up the ssid and you should be good to go. As far as shareing resources.


Your MAC cant change. there must be something else wronge.

[modgeek2003]

your set up should be


internet --> modem --> router-->

nic 1 ---> nic 2 ---> switch or wireless access point --> laptop wireless card.