IP routing with Windows XP

[hartz]

Hi there gurus.

I've have for many years had the fuzzy warm comfortable knowledge that under TCP/IP properties there somewhere is an option to turn on "IP Forwarding" to make a router out of an ordinary windows box, even though I've never needed to use this ... I vaguely recall quickly testing it once, but I never realy needed it.

Until now. I now need this option to forward packets between a Wireless card and an Ethernet card in system running Windows XP, but the setting appears to be gone.

I have played arround with network port bridging, I even got it to work, but this is not what I need, I do NOT want to make one network out of two networks, and in any case, the briding was very unstable (Seemed that whenever the Wireless network got disconneced, I had to re-create the bridge, which upset my firewall, and just generally caused me grief)

Does anybody know how I can enable routing of IP packets via a windows XP machine, in particular to route between Ethernet and a 802.11g networks.

Oh, I should add "for free" - my budget is nil. :-)

Thanx,
_Hartz

[profdlp]

Run the Network Setup Wizard and make sure you enable Internet Connection Sharing. It will allow you to have all your computers go through one machine for Internet access.

How many computers do you have and how many are wireless?

[hartz]

Thanx for the response profdlp. This is not for Internet connection sharing (I use IPCop for that). The network is small, consisting of 3 wired and two wireless laptops. One of the desktop computers have both WiFi and Wired network interfaces.

The setup is as follow:

Public network (Internet) -> IPCop -> wired lan (10.24.1.*) -> WinXProuter -> WiFi (10.24.2.*).

The notebook computers will be set with a static route for 10.24.1.* via the WinXProuter, and similarly, the wired workstations (including IPCop) will be set with a static route for 10.24.2.* via the WinXProuter.

The access is bi-directional, for example for Peer-to-peer applications, so I do not think Internet Connection sharing is going to work.

[deicist]

According to This (http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/w2kprout.html) you need to change a registry entry:

"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\IPEnableRouter"

by default it's set to 0, you just need to set it to 1.

edit: This (http://www.petri.co.il/configuring_routing_in_w2k_pro_xp_pro.htm) says the same thing for confirmation, and gives a bit more info about setting up the IP addresses for the seperate networks.