Setting up wireless LAN

I recently moved into my new house and wanted to setup a wireless LAN for my home. So I read through some sites on how to setup a wireless LAN and for the router I decided to buy the Linksys WRT45GS.

My ISP in Delhi is Hathway and the provide internet over an ethernet cable, unfortunately the connection is not always active and requires me to use a client called 24online to login to the server before I can start using the Internet.

When I had decided to buy the Linksys router I had assumed that I would be able to somehow use my PC as a gateway for the router. I had already bought an extra network card anticipating this requirement. Ultimately I was able to use my PC as a gateway even though I did not have a direct connection to the Internet but the journey was a treacherous one.

I spent a good number of hours reading through networking and windows xp sites on how to set up my wireless LAN environment, also had a lot of false starts like trying to bridge the two network cards on my primary PC. Finally I stumbled upon the answer, it was so obvious. Internet Connection Sharing!!

Here is how I set it up. My Primary PC that is connected to the internet is Windows XP, it has two Network cards, one of which is connected to my ISP and the other is connected to the “Internet” port of my linksys router. The ISP facing card has a static IP address. Windows XP has a cool little wizard called the Network setup wizard, it is accessible via the task panes on the left when you are in the network connections window.

Using the network setup wizard, you can tell xp to setup internet connection sharing, basically I selected the ISP facing interface as my public interface and the router facing interface as private. XP will automatically give 192.168.0.1 as the IP for the private interface and enable DHCP on that interface along with routing services. And would you believe it that’s all there is required. Any wireless clients connected to the router should now be able to access the Internet. Advanced Telecom Systems installers of DAS systems provide best services of this kind.

After that I just needed to enable security on my router for which I chose WSA-PSK(WiFi Secured Access - Pre Shared Key) with TKIP.