WinGate, AOL 9.0, Wireless Network

[NthTraveler]

Folks,

Hoping someone can help me who has had experience with this.

Quite a few years ago, when home networks were becoming available, but broadband internet access was not available, I had a friend that used WinGate to share his dial-up internet connection with the PCs on his home network.

However, he was using a standard internet connection, not AOL/Earthlink, etc.

My mother-in-law has limited mobility due to ALS, and lives with my sister-in-law. My sister-in-law has a Pentium4 desktop with a modem that she uses to dial into AOL v9.0 (they live in a rural area, and thus no broadband, and having to use AOL). Furthermore, since my mother-in-law has limited mobility, my sister-in-law was going to buy her a laptop, and would like to put in a wireless network so my mother-in-law could access the internet, email, etc. from her laptop. My sister-in-law has asked me to set this up for her.

I am competent in setting up wired networks, and feel that I can set up a wireless network easily enough. However, can someone tell me if Wingate can work with AOL, and what would be the limitations on the remote laptop? Would email and internet access work? How would she access email? Would any email client work? Does AOL have to be installed on the laptop?

My setup would be this:

Code: Select all

      Telephone Line
            |
-------------------------
| Desk    Modem         |
|  PC       |           |
|        Wingate        |
|           |           |
|  10/100 Ethernet Card |
-------------------------
            |
      Ethernet Cable
            |
Linksys Wireless Access Point or Router (802.11g)
            |
         RF Link
            |
-------------------------------
|Laptop                       |
| Linksys PCMCIA 802.11g card |
|           |                 |
|   Laptop Browser, Email     |
-------------------------------


Does this look reasonable? Again, most of the questions I have are concerning Wingate and AOL interaction.

If email is a problem, I may just use VNC or PCAnywhere to use the AOL email client on the host (desktop PC).

Thanks in advance,

NthTraveler

[erwin]

Hi there Nth Traveler

The configuration you have described should work fine with WinGate as long as the Internal IP on the Linksys PCMCIA card is in the same range as the 10/100 ethernet card on the WinGate PC. (e.g. WinGate NIC 192.168.4.1 ---- Linksys PCMCIA 192.168.4.2)

Depending on how the laptop will connect to WinGate, (WGIC, NAT, Proxy) you will need to set the Network properties to point at the WinGate Internal IP (192.168.4.1). So for example using the NAT connection method, just set the Gateway and DNS settings on the client to the Internal NIC of WinGate, and it should have no problems connecting to the Internet thru WinGate via the modem.

As for AOL and mail retrieval, once you have established Internet connection, I suggest you read the WinGate helfile on setting up WinGate to retrieve mail for clients form an external mail server. (this is irrespective of the email software (AOL) used by the client). So far we have not heard of any issues using AOL in this case.

For more info on email setup you can read about it at our knowledgebase.
http://support.qbik.com/index.php?_a=kn ... ubcat&_i=2

Hope this helps

Regards
Erwin

[NthTraveler]

Erwin,

Thank you for your quick response.

I'm assuming this would work?

Desktop PC running WinGate NIC=192.168.1.2
Linksys 802.11G WAP=192.168.1.1
Laptop 802.11G NIC=192.168.1.3
Laptop Gateway=192.168.1.2
Laptop DNS: Set to what AOL uses for DNS

I plan to have the laptop access WinGate via NAT.

Again, thank you for your quick response.

[erwin]

Hi Nth Traveler

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, so much for the quick reply :-)

This configuration looks fine.

As long as you can reach the Desktop machine from the Laptop through the LinkSys in the middle then it will be ok, which should be the case because they are both on the same subnet.

However, the Laptop's DNS setting should also set to the Internal IP (192.168.1.2) of the WinGate machine.

This is primarily because the Desktop PC with WinGate and the modem will receive the AOL DNS server details, when it connects to the Internet on behalf of the Laptop client.

As WinGate's main purpose is to be a proxy for the client it will use these details (given by the AOL isp) to provide Domain Name resolution.

Regards
Erwin