Wingate 5.2.3 Lost Connectivity

[eh936]

Hello everyone.

I've just recently downloaded the trial version of Wingate firewall. Wingate also acts as a proxy server for my home network. I've got 4 computers connecting through a fifth computer running Wind98SE and Wingate. This computer has two network cards. one connected to the cable modem and the other to the local network. The local network is connected all together using coaxial cable using T connectors and terminators respectively. My ISP requires that each additional computer connected to the internet to use a separate IP from them at a monthly charge over and above what the standard single computer service cost is. I do not wish to do this thus I am using wingate. The problem I have noticed recently is that my computers on the local network loose their internet connection. I not able to ping the gateway computer running wingate nor can I renew the ip address. However the gateway computer which has the direct connection never has once lost internet connection. Is it possible that my ISP has dectected that I am running multiple computers on my network and they can see the different MAC addresses by examining the individual packets filtered by their gateway or servers ? Or is that Wingate has detected an intrustion of some sort and has shut down all outgoing trafic from the trusted zone (local network) ? When my local network looses its connectivity I have checked the firewall log which shows no recordings of any intrusion attempts. I would really appreciate if someone might be able to shed some light on this problem ? I had the same problem when I had Win98SE ICS enabled and running Zonealarm running. Should I retire the gateway computer running Wingate and use a router instead. This would not be easy since running cables from the top level to the downstairs where the modem is located would be sort of a difficult task.

[erwin]

Hi there

I take it that you have WinGate issuing Ip addresses to the 4 machines in fully automatic mode (assign them IP address,Gateway, and DNS)?

It is unlikely that the ISP is affecting the internal NIC address of your WinGate machine. But it could be that the ISP is renwewing the IP address of the external direct connection, and unfortunately WinGate will not know about (bind to) this new IP address (interface) until the WinGate engine is restarted. Not that this should affect the clients being able to ping the Gateway(WinGate machine), but it would affect their Internet access.

As a suggestion to help troubleshoot your problem, since there are only 4 client machines, you could try assigning them a static private address (rather then them relying on the WinGate DHCP). Point their Gateway and DNS to the internal private IP(NIC) of the WinGate Server that is connected to the LAN.

This way they should always be able to ping the WinGate server regardless of the state of the Internet connection on the server. Then you be able to see if this is the cause or not. Also from my experience of coaxial cable based LANs they can be slightly erratic in connectivity if there are any loose connections.

Regards
Erwin

[eh936]

Hi and thanks alot for the reply. Yes I am using dynamic ip assignment. I can give a try using a static ip addressing. The public IP address assigned by my ISP hasn't changed it quite some time. Its been at least a month I imagine. During this time I was experiencing the loss of connectivity. I'll post back as soon as I loose connectivty once I start using static ip addressing. You are right about the problem with using coaxial cabling. It has caused some problems for me where I had to search out any trouble spots on the network. But right now everything is working ok. But I am starting to think its time to upgrade maybe to wireless since running CAT cabling may not be possible.

[eh936]

Hi erwin.

Everything is working just fine. I did loose connectivity once. But after examining all 10BaseT connections all was well. I think you are right that the cables for this type of network has its faults. I really appreciate the help. Thanks again.