sharing cable connection over LAN....help

[arnott]

I've set up a small office peer-peer lan under win88SE with 5 PCs and a el-cheapo ethernet hub. 4 of the PCs have 3Com NICs the other has 2 NICs (don't remember brands), one NIC is for the modem and the other for the LAN. Before I installed cable i shared a dial-up connection with reasonable performance given the speed of the connection. Having recently installed the cable the speed of the connection has actually dropped particularly when surfing. I'm using analogX as a proxy server at the moment and believe that that may be the cause of the decrease in the speed (even the PC with the modem has relatively slow connection).

Is this problem capable of being fixed by another proxy server application, if so which one is best. I would prefer to keep cost to a minimum but will consider all options.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[cobra25]

well I'm sharing my cable connection with 4 pc's using ICS it's very easy to setup and i have had no problems.

go here for a good guide to ICS
www.annoyances.org/win98 (http://www.annoyances.org/win98)

I've used a few proxy servers, but i found them quite difficult to setup and not to fast.

anyway good luck

[Matt615]

Hey there arnott. I have my network setup as follows. NIC to NIC with a cross over cable and using Dial up connection and sharing the connection with AnalogX proxy.

For some reason I find that the analog proxy does slow down the connection on the other computers a little bit. I can notice it on a dial up connection but I didnt think anything would be noticed with a cable connection. AnalogX proxy is one of the easiest to set up. Basically all you do is run it and it is ready to go. If you have WIN98SE or WINME than you could try Internet Connection Sharing software that is provided. Other than that I dont really know any good proxy's.....I am looking into getting a better one myself, I am just waiting until I get Cable.

You can look into WinProxy....I think it is about $50 but I could be wrong. Go here to find out more info. www.winproxy.com (http://www.winproxy.com) .....

I know WinProxy has a lot more features, it has a built in firewall, built in virus scanning, web site blocking and filetering, other parental controls and other things.
Hope this helps.

Good Luck

[glc1]

arnott, try ICS or other NAT/proxy software.

You can also use a rotuer instead of a server and routers w/ buil-in hubs or switches are available.

[arnott]

I've tried ICS, analogX and Avirt Gateway. After i uninstalled Avirt Gateway (demo) an icon remained in my Control Panel of the server and client PCs, although inactive. Is it possible there there have been made some changes to the system registry as a result of the installation that have not been reversed on uninstall which may be causing the lack of speed?

I've pinged just about everything I can think of and it seems really fast hence my conclusion that it is software related problem.

Also can anyone point me to a good guide on setting up a router if I decide to buy one.

Thanks

[glc1]

Originally posted by arnott:
Also can anyone point me to a good guide on setting up a router if I decide to buy one.Each router is different.

[arnott]

Also one further problem (happens occasionally). If I try to download a file there is a very slow transfer rate (3.5-6Kb/s) initially but if simultaneously I am downloading two or more files the download speed reaches 55Kb/s in total between the two downloads. Also whilst downloading one file loading a web page will temporarily increase the download rate.

Can anyone make head or tail of this?