I’m not sure if this is the right place for this or not but maybe somebody can help me.
I already had AOL broadband silver running on one pc in the house. This connected to my phone line through a BT Voyager 105 USB ADSL modem and all was well.
My flatmate bought himself a pc and wanted to connect to t’internet too. So he found out that AOL silver will not allow more than one pc to be connected so I upgraded to AOL Gold. Next he bought a Mentor ADSL router and a big long cable to reach to his room.
In theory, we should connect: phone line to router, router to my pc’s lan card and his pc’s lan card. I think.
We tried this and it doesn’t work, we been through all the settings we could find on aol but can’t get it to work.
The router also has a usb socket on it, we connected this to the pc as well as the lan cable but again it didn’t work. We also tried the usb on its own but that didn’t work either.
Now we are thinking maybe we need to connect my existing BT modem to the router first but the cable we need to do this apparently doesn’t exist. It is a usb connector, to plug two standard usb cables together.
My flatmate has been told by a few people that he has all we need and it should work very simply but we can’t figure it out.
Do any of you nice kind techy type people have any info that could help us? Or even point us in the right direction?
We await your replies with baited breath.
T.
P.S I have re-connected my old modem to enable me to ask you this.
Plug everything into the router. It depends on your service, but sometimes you need to register the MAC address with the network and can only connect using that device. Each network device has it’s own mac address so right now the network recognizes your PCs MAC address, but not the routers. At least that’s how it works with my cable internet.
Most broadband accounts specify only one IP address can be used. This is normal. Here’s a quick lesson.
The one IP address gets assigned to the MAC address that belongs to the ADSL/Cable router. If that router has DHCP capabilities you’re in luck. You’ll just need to enable it (if it’s not already) and plug your flatmates ethernet cable into it and have him reboot his PC. ( you don’t normally need a second ADSL router )
Heres a breakdown.
- IP address from provider is assigned to Router
- DHCP is enabled inside router, typically for 192.168.x.x range.
- You plug both PC's into the router and reboot your PC's
- Your PC's get assigned IP addresses by the router. (from a command prompt you can type ipconfig /all and see what you have)
Typically that’s all there is to it. Of course there’s always something that gets lost in translation.
We got it working, kind of. We can only surf through AOL, Microsoft Internet Explorer won’t work. I had to set up another screen-name and my flatmate signs on to AOL with that name.
So it works, but I don’t think it’s working 100% properly, but it works!
