Two laptops, one Broadband connection

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Last week I was working away, and found myself and co-worker Tim in an interesting position.  I had a free Internet connection on the wall, but we had two laptops.  I guess we could have taken turns, but that isn't me.  If there is a way to do something with computers I'll find it, even if the time taken is greater than the time needed just to check some e-mail and updates on Facebook.

Now I have done plenty of Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) with Windows boxes before, but setting up the wireless without some sort of router is one of those things that I know can be done, but I've never needed to, until now.

ICS
Here is a nice How-To on ICS for XP. All you need to do for this exercise is put ICS on the connection that has access to the net, be that Dial-up, LAN, or Broadband.

Once this is done, the laptop is turned into a DHCP server and any other computers connected to it will (if they are set to DHCP) use the laptop as a Internet gateway.  Now all we need to do is connect to the first laptop wirelessly.

Ad-Hoc Connection
Once the ICS is setup, we just need to turn the first laptop into a wireless base station, which the second laptop will connect to.  To do this, we make an Ad-Hoc connection on the first laptop, which is nicely explained here.

Once the second laptop connects to the first, it should be given the right settings to share the Internet and you're done.  It works quite well and we were able to entertain ourselves for the evening, and of course get some work done.

If you have any suggestions or questions, or even a better way to do this, let me know.

Jason Remnant

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