Do I Need ICS If I Have a Router?

[ScaryBinary]

This makes no sense to me. I have a router, with DHCP disabled to allow port forwarding. Both PCs on my LAN thus have static IPs, 192.168.xxx.xxx.

It seems logical to me that I could therefor disable the Internet Conection Firewall / Internet Connection Sharing service, yet when I do (and reboot) I can't seem to connect to the internet.

I'm not a whiz when it comes to this stuff, and I can't seem to find any info on how I can disable ICF/ICS and just use the router for sharing.

Is this setup possible? I'm running XP Pro on both machines. Help! :confused:

Thanks!

[Midknyte]

Do I Need ICS If I Have a Router?

No.

did you enter the default gateway? that's the IP of the router

did you enter the dns server information? you can get this from the router configuration program.

[ScaryBinary]

I did enter my router's IP as the gateway. For the DNS server info, I entered my ISP's DNS servers (RoadRunner). I did notice that my router has stored 3 DNS IPs, while I have only 2 listed in my network settings. Do these need to be exactly the same? Where does my router get these DNSs (I only recall entering them in Windows, not the router setup.)

Thanks for your help.

[Midknyte]

you should copy the router's dns servers in order.

the router gets the dns information from the isp.

[ScaryBinary]

OK, the problem actually seemed to be my Sygate firewall (duh, my colon says 'Hi!'). I disabled it and I was able to get to the internet without ICS/ICF enabled (and NetBIOS disabled).

BUT....when I renabled my firewall I noticed that my PC seems to be expecting all kinds of communications on ports like 1085, 1083, 1104, etc --- all to remote port 80. What's up with this? Also web pages seem to load much slower now with the firewall enabled. Maybe I'm flipping my lid. Is this due to me disabling NetBIOS?

At anyrate, since I have a router I'm not real concerned about disabling my software firewall.

[Midknyte]

did you already scan for viruses and spyware? it could be trojans.

[ScaryBinary]

Ya, I run Ad-aware, Spybot, and Norton Antivirus weekly (at least). I don't know what it is, but it seemed to start after I messed around with the ICS/ICF. I had set Sygate up to block that range of ports, and never had any trouble with it. Then when I disabled ICS/ICF I noticed Sygate logging (and presumably blocking) packets on 1104, 1085, and other weird ports. Not sure what the deal is.