XP with OSX Wireless networking.. possible?? (Advice needed)

[PeterLaurens]

Hi everybody,

I am slowly undergoing a struggle to convert my Parents house away from the Wintel machines they are currently using, and into a state of the art Mac friendly setup.

There are several machines throughout the large house, my sister's iBook, My PMG4, my mothers PMG4, and my little sister's eMac. My dad however will want to hang on to his WinXP machine as it's used primarily for business, and he needs to run things like MS Project which there isnt a version for on OSX, plus, he's scared to move platform (I've tried, he doesn't understand).

So the problem I have is with wireless networking, If the house was set up all with Mac's, I'd slap Airport in all of them and be done with it... but how do I get the PC to play along as well? It gets even more complex when I throw in the fact that the PC will be doing the Internet Connection Sharing, as the USB ADSL modem I have is Windows only. This hasn't been a problem until now, as my Dad and I had our machines networked together and the Mac did an excellent job of getting Internet access from the PC without me doing a single thing.

How does having a wireless network change this?

The machines will all be running 10.2 (except the PC which will be WinXP).

Has anyone wirelessly networked in a mixed platform environment before? Any advice at all would be most helpful, as I'm at the end of my knowledge at the moment, and need some help, I'm hoping you guys can give me a bit of advice.

Grateful thanks,

-Peter Laurens
(peter@thenakededge.net)

[Captain Code]

Wireless networking will work fine on a mixed platform network.

You can get Airport cards for your portables, or all of your Macs, or you can also use many other brands of wireless cards.

I believe that the Airport base station can bridge an Ethernet and wireless network together to make it seem like one network. That way wireless and wired computers can share files, etc.

The base station should use the PC as it's gateway(router) and the wireless computers should use the base station as their gateway(router).

[Dusky]

I have an airport base station. The way I see it, you connect your ADSL modem to the airport base station... and connect the PC to the ABS through an ethernet cable. The macs can each have an airport card installed.

I know pretty much nothing about networking, so someone correct me if I'm wrong for thinking that the PC would work without any problems if connected from the ethernet line-out of the ABS.

[PeterLaurens]

My only problem with this is that the ADSL modem is USB based, so I can't use a standard router with it, it has to be connected to the PC.

-Peter

[Captain Code]

Originally posted by PeterLaurens
My only problem with this is that the ADSL modem is USB based, so I can't use a standard router with it, it has to be connected to the PC.

-Peter

That doesn't matter, it'll still work. Just tell your base station to use the PC as it's gateway and it will work fine.

[Rhino_G3]

Originally posted by devonferns


That doesn't matter, it'll still work. Just tell your base station to use the PC as it's gateway and it will work fine.

You're right, that would work slick. I was wondering how he could pull this off until I read your reply. Fast, Easy, that's the way I like it

[Zeigan]

is it an internal adsl modem? if so i dont know...

If it is an external modem, just buy a wireless router and plug the adsl into the wan port and the rest of the computers can connect through wireless.

I am using a wireless speedstream router w/ a tibook and an athlon computer. All work great.