Does Windows ICS suck?

[king4lex]

Hi,

Was just over at a friend's house setting up their network on both his WinXP comps. I got file/printer sharing up and running in about 10 seconds, but Internet Connection Sharing was really giving me the grief. They have dialup like I used to have. And actually, when I had dialup, I never managed to get ICS working for me either (I used a proxy instead).

After screwing around with it for a couple minutes, I finally decided to do the same thing I had done on my network when I had dialup, I just installed a proxy on the computer with the modem, and set the other one up as a client. It works fine.

But the whole thing got me wondering. How come I was never able to get ICS to work? Has anyone else had the same problem? Or is it just me?

 

[MercenaryForHire]

It sucks. Royally.

So does dialup. Please tell me it's not a voluntary choice.

- M4H

 

[The Green Bean]

it is almost impossible to get ICS working on Dialup!

 

[Amaroque]

When I was stuck with dialup, I had ICS working fine. On 2x WinME machines, nonetheless.

 

[The Green Bean]

whenever my cable goes down and I revert to Dialup, I can only get it to wor properly on the host PC...The only thing tht works on the clients is AIM.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I was able to get ICS on XP to work with dialup, but it was indeed a PITA. ICS sucks.

 

[ProviaFan]

I had ICS working with dialup on Windows 2000 and XP. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a whole lot of options, so for example, there's no way to tell it to trigger a dialup connection when a request is sent for a web page, but not to do so if a connection isn't already up when the Windows clock wants to synchronize. This resulted (for me) in a lot of "false" autodial attempts, to the point where we just left the phone line unplugged when we weren't actually using the computer - quite a PITA.

Another factor that was a problem for me was that it would not successfully dial out when noone was logged in. It would try, but kept failing for some reason (I think it wasn't able to authentificate - almost as if it would only send the right username and password if someone was logged in).

Linux - what I use now - is somewhat harder to set up (there are simplified "router" distributions, and plenty of documentation), but infinitely more flexible. If you have a spare computer (can be an old 300MHz K6-2) and a Linux-compatible modem and some time to mess with it, I'd highly recommend giving it a try.