Sharing internet connection through a crossover cable
 

What I want to do is use a crossover CAT5 cable between two devices and share the internet connection on the first with the second. Two different scenarios, in both instances I got messages indicating that there were problems with the assigned IP address.

Scenario 1: I have two laptops, both of which are folding madly away for the Flyertalk Folding at Home team (curing cancer, etc.. see my sig line for details). Neither are on a network, but one is hooked up to a phone line. I plan to set it to autodial on a schedule, and I want the other to piggyback and upload completed work when it does. Any reason why those two can't be linked with the crossover and then have the dialup work?

Scenario 2: my pretty new xbox 360 needs an internet connection so 12 year olds in Taiwan can crush me in COD2. I (a) won't spend $100 to get the proprietary M$ USB adapter (no other USB adapter will work as you cannot load drivers, so it is that or use the cat5 jack) and (b) I haven't gotten around to running cat 5 to that part of the house. So I want to connect the xbox 360 with the crossover cable to my laptop which is connected to my wireless network.

Both seem like plug and play no brainers, but when I click on share internet connection I get error messages back in both situations. Anybody have any words of wisdom?

Thanks, TJ

Where are the machines getting their IP address? If you haven't set them, then you need to set them so that they are different. I'm betting they are defaulting to the same address.

get a simple wifi network adaptor, gaming adaptor, 802.11 g is the one you need. That will hookup to the ethernet port on the 360. these can be had for about 40-60$. Your xbox won't know the differance.

XP has an option to bridge a pair of adapters in the Network Connections control panel which will accomplish what you want. You can also setup the laptop as a router and put your xbox on a subnet behind it using the Internet Connection Service. That said, do what someone else said - get a wired to wireless adapter from linksys or dlink or similiar at Best Buy, CompUSA, etc...

have you tried using the internet connection sharing wizard? the ip address on both network adapters need to be set manually (which the wizard will do for you), so maybe that is why you are getting the assigned IP address error.

You cannot use a crossover cable to use two computers on one internet connection. A crossover ethernet cable can be used to connect two isolated computers together to form a 2 computer LAN (eg, copy files, etc..).

In order to get 2 computers on a network, you'll need to get a hub or preferably a router to create a network.

In your case, it sounds like you want two computers to be able to make a dial-up connection. The most straightforward way to do this is to independently connect each computer to the phone line or to use separate phone lines -- one for each laptop.

Not completely true of course; if the PC has 2 ethernet cards and this will work just fine using Windows ICS.

dangit!
 

ScottC!!! I was JUST about to say this,

but yes, with a nice crossover, you can setup a sweet laptop to laptop, or desktop to other network with great speeds. I have this setup with a crossover and two IBM laptops both with GIGE so the transfer speeds are very fast.

Then, one of them has a wireless card setup connecting to the network for data transfer and internet. It was a bit of jiggering but it worked out, took about 20 minutes of trouble shooting and resetting and trying and resetting. I think there was SOMETHING that I cannot remember that required a reboot.

The crossover cable won't work for xbox live - unfortunately the xbox 360 has its own networking card and your laptop won't be able to serve as a router for it. You'll need to connect your xbox 360 to your router so that the network can identify it.

btw, Are you trying to play online with xbox live or a third party gaming network?

The difference between a crossover cable and a regular ethernet cable is that the send/receive wires have been reversed. A hub accomplishes the exact same thing, but it's used to connect more than 2 computers.

Microsoft XP has a built in internet connection sharing feature. As long as you have two network interfaces in your computer (which means you are getting your internet into your computer from something other than the ethernet port you want to share it with) you should be able to share it. It does not require a crossover cable.

Here's an example:

I was in a meeting with a vendor last week. I had access to my wireless network at work, but I couldn't get him on the wireless network. He plugged his laptop's ethernet port into my laptop's ethernet port directly using a standard (non-crossover) cable. My wireless network card obtained an IP address from the wifi network, and I turned Microsoft XP connection sharing on for my wireless network connection. My ethernet port was then had the ability to assign an additional, local IP address to anybody who connected to it, and it handled the routing. You could substitute "wireless connection" for "modem connection" and it would work just the same (albeit slower)

When you're dealing with a wired ethernet connection as your pipe to the internet (cable/dsl, office LAN, etc...) the best bet is to purchase a cheap little linksys router. If you're in a bind however, Windows XP connection sharing will accomplish the same task assuming you have an unused ethernet port and a regular ethernet cable.

Why wouldn't it? If it'll work on a router, it should work fine on the ethernet port of a laptop running ICS. Actually, Microsoft even explains how to do it:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/connect/windowsics.htm

(Granted, this is for the regular xbox, but should work the same on the 360)...

you're right -- most laptops only have one ethernet port though, so i guess you can only do this if you have a USB based cable/dsl modem or a dial up modem...

But the OP said:

So I want to connect the xbox 360 with the crossover cable to my laptop which is connected to my wireless network.

So... He is online with the wireless (network adapter 1), and uses ICS to route that to the ethernet port (network adapter 2).

Just to update those of you who helped out above - problems continued on the xbox 360 issue so I went to the source. Microsoft online chat was no help - for some reason they decided that as I was trying to use ICS that I had to call a 800 number and they would not touch it.

Called the 800 number, got transferred a few times, got a guy who was reading off of a script and plugged in a few different DNS numbers at his suggestion (DNS was where it was hanging at this point). He finally went off to talk to a supervisor and came back to announce that the problem was that I was using W2k Pro and that ICS would only work with the Xbox 360 if I used XP.

That made no sense to me at all, seemed like a cop-out by folks who couldn't find my issue in their script, so I continued to play on my own. Next step was to shut down zone alarm. Everything worked perfectly, immediately. Go figure.

Having won that battle, I put in an ethernet line to that corner of the house the next day since I had to be under there anyhow. Now it is blazingly fast and no need to hook up laptops, etc...

As for the two laptops sharing a dial-up - the girlfriend finally claimed that extra laptop yesterday before I got back to trying to sort that one out. Oh well, it was just a PIII so Folding at home won't lose that much processing power...

Thanks for the help, TJ