Remote Access toHome Network

[Jon_Morgan]

In the next few months I plan on buying a laptop for school and work. I will need a dial up ISP, but I was thinking about going about it another way. I already have Cable Internet service at my home so I was thinking about building an inexpensive computer that I could dial into and connect the internet via my Cable connection. I figure a system like this should be more than sufficient:

P3 450
256M RAM
MB with onboard sound and LAN 10/100
8M Video card
56K Modem
20G 7200 RPM HD

Now for my questions:

What inexpensive software can I use to accomplish this or can I use what I already have?
Should I use different hardware?
Will I need to buy a Server OS?

I already have Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, NT 5.0 and Windows 2000. I was thinking about running Windows 2000 as my OS. I was also thinking about buying a Cable/DSL router for DHCP and a firewall in place of my Hub.

Thanks in advance for any input,
Jon

[M_Six]

Hmm. Interesting idea. I take it your school and/or workplace are within local calling distance from your home? Otherwise you could be looking at some serious phone bills.

If you decide to go with this, get the cable router and set everything up with static IPs. Don't use DHCP. Or as a minimum, don't use DHCP for your dial-in box or your laptop. They should both have static IPs on the same network. In other words, if the LAN side of your cable router is 192.168.1.1, your dial-in box could be 192.168.1.2 and your laptop could be 192.168.1.3. Make sure you have IP Forwarding set on the dial-in box.

Once you have the dial-in box getting out to the internet through cable and accepting logons through the modem, set up the laptop with the static IP mentioned above and set its gateway as the dial-in box. Use the same DNS IPs on everything. The DNS IPs come from the cable provider.

Alternately, you could just set up JUNO on your laptop. It's free, usually pretty fast, and they have tons of local calling numbers. You can check it out at www.juno.com. (http://www.juno.com.)

[Jon_Morgan]

Thanks for the input I will set it up the way you recommeded. Now for one more question where can I get a dial in box?

Thanks again,
Jon

[M_Six]

By saying "dial-in box" I was referring to the machine with the modem you are planning on building. That would be the machine you dial-in to to get on your network.

Sorry for the confusion.

[cadetstimpy]

Easy. On a Win2k system you can Internet share your NIC to all other connections which includes any Dial Up connections defined. The only thing left is to create a dial up connection that is set to listen for pick up when it rings. Do this by using the Accept Incoming Connections options when running the Make New Connection Wizard.