TCP / IP question

[Guest]

What i am trying to do is this:


Here's the computer situation at my place.

My pgaming and main internet computer is upstairs on my bro's room. The cable modem is downstairs and a long UTP cable goes up and connects to it.

Downstairs we have another computer mostly used by my mom... a PIII450, my old game and internet computer. So it has a network card.

What i want to do is:

I want to have a UTP cable from the network card on the comp downstairs to the cable modem, but not plugged in, the one from upstairs will be plugged in.

However, when my bro is asleep upstairs and i wanna go online, i'll then switch the upstairs cable out, and put the downstairs one in!

However i cant get it to work yet.

There are two possible reasons:

The cable i bought is the wrong kind,

My comp wont work it because i can't add the right TCP/IP protocol. I can only get it to say TCP/IP under network at the control panel, and not TCP/IP with aRROW AND THEN MY NETWORK CARD NAME, WHICH IS A 3COM 509b isa OR SOMETHING...




whoops, caps sorry


if anyone can help me, thanks!

 

[Guest]

I wouldn't worry about the TCP/IP entry in the network protocol settings... It probably only has one entry because you don't have another device that can use TCP/IP installed. If you want to be sure, uninstall the TCP/IP stack, reboot, and then reinstall it.

The cable should most likely be a straight through cable (if you look at both ends of the cable, the colors should be going in the same order (orange/white, orange, green/white, blue, blue/white, green, brown/white, brown (or the green and orange pairs can be swapped - but both ends must be the same)). Check the current cable that goes upstairs and see if it's end is the same on both ends... your cable will have to match (not necessarily the exact sequence, but it either has to be straight through, or crossover where one side has the orange pair starting, and the other has the green pair starting)...

Did I confuse you yet?

What kind of settings do you have for you TCP/IP stack? They should be exactly the same as on the PC upstairs. You might have to reboot after you connect it into the cable modem for it to take effect. (or run winipcfg from the Run... and you can renew your IP from the DHCP server within the cable modem).

It should work though...

 

[Guest]

You will also probably need to power cycle the cable modem (unplug the power for about 1 minute then plug it back in...)
This is to release the MAC address of the network device in memory; when you plug it back in it should get the right MAC address for your computer downstairs. (Make sure to wait some time though, usually 15 seconds should be enough but not with all cable modems).

The wire should be a straight cat5 RJ-45 wire.

As for the TCP-IP settings, you will not see the name of the NIC bound to the protocol if you have only one adapter. For most cable providers, all settings will be dynamic (DHCP). If you want to make sure you have the right ones, just remove the TCP-IP stack then reinstall it; the default settings of Windows (all versions) will do for almost all providers (basically disable DNS, no gateway, no WINS, IP is automatic).