Hello all,
knew this thing very well that i'm on linux forum, but still posting this query b'coz i know it could be solved here only.

i've two systems.
desktop and laptop
desktop has the two ethernet cards. One for ethernet modem and second one for lan connection with laptop.
no router or hub or swtich.
Both systems have slacware and windows XP.
have configure NFS and shorwall properly in order the have lan connetion as well as to give the laptop internet connetion.

Now i'm trying the same set up in windows also.

Deskotp:
NIC 1 eth0 ( 192.168.1.2): for modem( 192.168.1.1)
NIC 2 eth1 ( 192.168.0.1): for lan with laptop ( 192.168.0.2)

lan has been established. But the speed of data transfer b/w two machines is damn poor.
while opting the option "setup small office/home network", i'm not sure what setting i should go for.

In desktop i'm choosing the option "this computer connects directly to the internet and other computer connect to the internet through this system as gateway"
Which lan card should be used here??? eth0 or eth1 ?

In laptop i'm choosing: "this computer connects to the internet through another computer as gateway"

moreover i've assigned IP address manually and in laptop the gateway is "192.168.0.1" i.e eth1 of desktop.

But laptop is not being able to access internet and as i stated above that lan sharing speed is damn poor.

any help will be appriciated.

regards

what is DNS set to on the laptop? Why not allow the desktop to be your DHCP server and have the laptop get all its ip info through DHCP?

How slow is low for network transfers? What speed is each computer and its NIC?

Hello,
as i stated earlier that i've successfully configured NFS and shorewall on linux on Desktop, so there doesn't arises the question of DNS set up on laptop.

while on linux on desktop.....the laptop can access internet properly, be it on windows or linux.

so the problem lies somewhere in the settings in windows on Desktop.

and the data transfer is quite slow on windows....its much better on linux (NFS)..so no lan card issues

any further suggestions ???

regards

So, you say that your laptop can connect to the internet, no matter what the OS of the desktop is. This means that the networking configuration is done OK (ie DNS, DHCP, etc) should work.

However, you claim that "data transfer is slower when your desktop runs Windows". What do you mean exactly by this? Is the transfer of files slower between your laptop and desktop if the desktop is running Windows?
Or do you mean that the internet speed is slower when running Windows on the desktop?

The first can be related to using NFS sharing (if your laptop and desktop are both running Linux) vs SMB/CIFS sharing (if they're both Windows) or some intermediate form (ie Samba) (if one is Linux and other is Win).
Different protocols for sharing disks/transferring files mean different speeds. However, I can't imagine that there will be very big differences, but I'm no expert in this matter.

The second issue - slower internet speed - is more related to network routing and configuration, probably.

As for your first post, your desktop must indeed be setup to run as a "gateway" for your laptop. This means that it needs to do some routing. In Config Panel, Networking settings, you should have defined 2 network interfaces, that represent your eth0 and eth1 cards. One accesses the modem, the other connects to the laptop.
Please look at the TCP/IP options for those 2 interfaces and post any relevant information you find or anything you're not sure of. The texts you've mentioned above (like "connect to internet directly and act as gateway for other computers") seem to come from the windows network connection wizzards. However, you must keep in mind that such wizzards, altough they can be very handy indeed, do not always provide you with all possibilities. From my experience, I know it's always a good idea to check the settings that the wizzard has set up for you.

Is the IP address of the Desktop (eth1) nick to the Modem correct. 192.168.1.1 is a private IP address.

Check that your netmask is correct. If the netmask is set to 192.168.0.0, this will be a problem because then both NICs would be on the same subnet. Most likely it should be something like 255.255.255.0, but it could be masked for a smaller subnet.