I am visiting a place where there is a Cables connection to the internet via a cable modem. They used to have a standard home wireless router, so I could connect my laptop wirelessly around the apartment. Unfortunately, the router is now broken, and their single PC is connected with a network cable directly to the cable modem.
A friend lent us a Siemens SL2-141 DSL modem/router. It has 4 Ethernet ports and one phone line port (RJ-11). [ note that a standard wireless router has a WAN Ethernet port as well for connection to the LAN or modem ]
So, I tried connecting the cable modem to one of the 4 ports and my PC to a second one, thinking it may function as a hub or switch so my PC "sees" the modem (and internet) via the SL2-141. This did not work.
Additionally, I tried configuring the wireless connection of the router and connect wirelessly (the cable modem still connected to the router), but this did not work too.
Is there a way to configure the SL2-141 as a wireless access point to a LAN?
Best Answer
I'd been puzzling over how you could get it to work, when I remembered Connectify. If you can get your hands on a wireless USB it should work perfectly for your situation instead of having to deal with that router.
I'm not sure there's a good way to connect the router like that, there's too many variables between the Siemens device and the cable modem. You might be able to connect the cable modem to a LAN port in the router, shut off DHCP in the router, give the router a static IP that's on the same subnet as the modem but not taking the modem's IP, and see if it will route packets appropriately between your computer and the cable modem. If you don't even get DHCP from the cable modem, that's a bad sign. You could try setting a static IP address for your computer and manually assigning the cable modem as the gateway, but it might just ignore your PC if it doesn't go through DHCP first (I know mine does.) The router might get confused too if it's looking for WAN, so setting to bridged mode might help. It all really depends on how the cable modem and router operate, and I'm not sure how much of this is standards based. Might end up being a lot of trial and error...
Connectify though is really easy, but you'll need XP with SP3, and you'll want to run in Ad-hoc mode anyway.