(Win7) Frequent data corruption with Internet Connection Sharing

Ankle

Junior Member
Oct 10, 2005
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Preface: Please - no snarky comments about getting a better connection. Living with this garbage dialup for what must be fifteen years I'm well aware how bad I need broadband. 3g is capped at a sad 3gb/mo with rather spotty coverage and satellite is expensive for a 250mb/day cap when its not rained or snowed out. No line of sight for anything else. That leaves dialup which I manage to pull down ~12gb/mo on... I'm stuck here with no viable alternatives for the foreseeable future. :(

Moving on to the problem at hand:

I am encountering frequent data corruption on every machine on my network other than the host with ICS enabled on my dialup connection. Websites are garbled characters, streaks and blocks are all over images, encrypted connections throw SSL errors out constantly and downloads fail their checksums. The internet is basically unusable on any of the machines on my network sharing the connection (an older windows xp box and my macbook pro). Everything works fine on the host machine though.

Just to be clear the data corruption is only when using the internet with ICS. All other network activity such as large file transfers between computers on the network manage to complete without issue and do not fail their checksums. Without ICS the internet is just fine - no problems outside of the usual dialup factor.

I've tried ICS with clean installs of both Windows 7 and Vista SP2 - both suffer the same problem. I've tested this with a 3g modem to rule out dialup/my modem (US Robotics 5610B) being the issue and it has the exact same problem with ICS. If I boot Windows XP Pro SP3 on the host machine and use it for ICS there is no data corruption and everything works fine on the networked machines.

The only thing I could find searching was this thread with a few others encountering the same issue and no solution: http://www.tomshardware.com/fo...random-data-corruption

No third party firewalls or anti-virus software. Tried it with and without the Windows Firewall and Microsoft Security Essentials - no different. Also tried using the default ip addresses/subnet that enabling ICS assigns instead of 10.x.x.x - no difference unfortunately. :(

ipconfig /all on windows 7: http://janpingel.com/misc/files/ipconfig-w7.txt
network map: http://janpingel.com/misc/files/network.png
 

RebateMonger

Elite Member
Dec 24, 2005
11,586
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Offhand, I don't know what's causing it. The first search result in Google indicates that yours is a common problem when using ICS on Vista (but not XP) with dial-up.

Have you considered not fighting this and just dedicating a front-end XP box?

Or trying a router that has a serial connection and can make use of a serial modem? The (now discontinued) DLink DI-804HV 4-port VPN router has a serial port. You can probably buy one on eBay. Using this wouldn't require the use of ICS.
 

Ankle

Junior Member
Oct 10, 2005
9
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I have considered setting up a router for dialup but I don't want another box on 24/7 between the noise and power usage. I looked at few routers capable of OpenWRT with usb (to share a printer and UPS) but the cost was prohibitive after the router + serial modem + serial to usb adapters. What few serial modems are still around are very expensive. I've tried several usb modems in vain to try and find one that works with OS X and is as reliable as my USR hardware modem but they all seemed to be awful. 14.4k awful and dropping out very regularly. It also looked like I'd probably have to roll my own OpenWRT with some specific kernel modules and drivers so I ended up going back to XP when Vista was released and I first hit this problem.