Lost communication on Win98 network

I have a very frustrating problem with what I thought would be a simple installation (sure you've never heard that before).

An office that has a pre-existing router, shared between two different workgroups, all running windows 98. The DSL router uses DHCP to assign IP's. One of the users of this network has decided to go with another DSL provider, and asked me to remove them from the original DSL setup and install/configure the new DSL setup.

The user purchased SBC Yahoo! DSL service through a special deal. They sent him a DSL modem. I suggested they return it for a router, but the deal was over by the time I got involved and they could not replace the modem. They asked me to set it up as is. I suggested the router again, but they wanted to stick with what they had. So, off to ICS land I went.

I removed the user's two PC's from the old network and set them up with their own hub. Both use Inel PRO/100 NICs. I also added a D-Link DFE 530TX+ to the PC with the new DSL modem. I removed the old settings in TCP/IP, which were the following (IP modified slightly to protect the inoccent, xxx designates same number scheme):

PC1:
Assigned IP - 192.168.xxx.28
Subnet - 255.255.255.0
Gateway - 192.168.xxx.254
DNS settings -
Host - TVN
Domain - zzzzz.com
DNS Server order - 66.52.xx.1
66.52.xx.2

PC2:
NIC1 (Intel PRO/100):
Assigned IP - 192.168.xxx.31
everything else same.

I reset both PC's to have the following:
Automatic assign IP
No Gateway
Disable DNS
Use DHCP for WINS resolution

Both PC's run W98 SE, use TCP/IP and NetB, Client for MS Networks, File and Printer Sharing enabled. Both PC's have a shared folder with full access. Both PC's could share folders, communicate through Network Neighborhood, and had network drives mapped before I made the changes.

I then added the new NIC for the DSL connection and configured TCP/IP as follows:

PC1, NIC2 (DFE-530TX+):
Auto Assign IP
No Gateway
Disable DNS
Disable WINS resolution

After the changes, the 2PC's no longer communicate. They can only see themselves on the network, not each other. I assigned static IP's to both, on the same subnet:

PC1, NIC1 (Intel PRO/100): 192.168.xxx.1
NIC2 (DFE 530TX+): Auto assign
PC2: 192.168.xxx.10
Subnet: 255.255.255.0

Still nothing. Can't even ping each other.

If I can't get the PC's to communicate on the network, I'm not going to get ICS to work. What am I missing? When I check winipcfg, I notice that the old router settings are still bound to the network cards. I released and renewed, rebooted, and they seem to have reset themselves to match the new IP settings, but still no dice in communicating. Any ideas?

I'm about ready to tell them to forget the 8 hours I put into this, and for my own sanity let me buy them a $49 Linksys 4 port router and have that set up everything through DHCP automatically. But, since I can't even get the two PC's to talk to each other through normal means, I'm worried this might not work either.

Any insight would be wonderful!

 

Daimeion - I'm afraid you've xxx a few things we need to see. And no need to either.

192.168.x.x addresses are always private. Any number of people can use the same IP since they never communicate to the internet (or usually never even cross a router). With the popularity of SOHO LANs being run by the Dlink/Linksys/Netgear/other similar router/switches, there are probably 20,000 or more PCs in the US with an address of 192.168.0.2 but they simply aren't available to attack from outside by IP address. A search on here for NAT should bring up a few threads with details about why this is the case.

The other addresses belong to the ISP and are public information.

However, absent the specifics I think I can still tell you enough to get things working.

- use a crossover cable to connect the hub to a port on the switch. That will put all the PCs on the same physical network.

- have all the PCs on the same logical network (based on IP address and subnet mask). Using a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 they will all have to be identical in the first 3 octets (so all 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x).

- have all the PCs and the router with a different internal IP address. ICS wants to use 192.168.0.1 for the host PC I think and probably won't like a change. This means that you will need all ICS connected PCs on 192.168.0.x. The router may also want that same address but should be easier to change so maybe make it 192.168.0.100.

The PCs on the 'old' internet connection will need to use the router's internal IP (192.168.0.x) as their default gateway while the ICS client PC will need to use the address of the ICS host PC (192.168.0.1) as it's default gateway.

At this point all should be well. Without knowing details about how much configuration your router will accept and since I haven't messed with ICS at all (and don't intend to) I can't be positive you can set everything as shown above but if not, post back with specifics and we'll go from there.

For instance, changing the subnet mask to 255.255.0.0 would greatly enlarge the IP address range for your logical network and would allow any PCs with 192.168.x.x to see each other and connect. Thus you could have the ICS devices at 192.168.0.x and the others at 192.168.1.x and they could still play together.