Hi Eric;

Sharing remote drives I haven't done. Haven't tried either, but I think it would be powerful.

Before I got the ADSL modem, I had a regular 28.8 dialup. I had two PC's at home connected with some thin-net ethernet. One for me and one for the kids to use. Their machine had the modem. I installed WinGate software on their machine which then allowed me to access the web from my PC. Wingate acted like a software proxy server. It was great, both PC's could connect to the web at the same time! In fact, if I opened IE on my PC, in about 15 seconds the modem on the other machine would start dialing out!

The only problems I had was that I couldn't do https (maybe I didn't configure it right) and I couldn't send replies from the UT for some reason. Other than sharing a 28.8 connection, it worked fine.

Now with the ADSL modem, I have two network cards in one PC. The Wingate version I had was really old and I think it expected a dial out connection so I downloaded some software call Internet Gate that acts like a proxy server/bridge over the two 'networks'.

On the PC not connected to the ADSL modem, I told IE to use a proxy server and gave it the IP address (Internal card) of the connected PC. Wierd setup for mail too, the POP server and SMTP server both point to the internal network card (set as 10.2.1.1). The Internet Gate software listens on the POP3 and SMTP ports and these are mapped to my actual mail server.

Bottom line is, it works fine and I could have a network of 5 PC's (or more) all sharing the same connection!

I'm not totally happy with Internet Gate because it seems to be causing some GPF's but that may be related to its logging functions. I turned most of them off and it seems more stable now.


>>>>You can pay more and get static IP addresses (I have a dynamic one, but it hasn't changed yet. Maybe if I turn the modem off.) I have two PC at home networked (so one PC has two ethernet cards) and I am using software so both can access the net. This works well too.
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>Thanks for the detailed explanation, but maybe I didn't make my question clear. (You sort of answered it anyway...)
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>I was confused about how one machine could be hooked to the internet through the cable modem, and the other machine, hooked to the first, could use the same internet connection. With a dial-up connection using a regular phone line, I don't think it would be possible, because the first wired machine would need to "forward" the IP packets to the second. But the fact that it is the modem that has the initially connected IP explains a little. I guess it is acting as a router of sorts.
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>BTW, connecting to the drive of a remote machine through TCP/IP is pretty cool. At one client's site, I have a development machine set up to automatically map a drive to a remote web server share through the internet. I can treat the drive as a local network drive:copy files, open them, whatever. I can even open a table inside VFP and browse it... from 1200 miles away.