I have two laptops, one running Vista and the other FreeBSD (which I have just installed and am currently learning to use). The Vista laptop has a wireless network card, the other laptop doesn't. At the moment I am connecting to the internet wirelessly on my Vista laptop; the wireless network card is configured like this:

IP: 192.168.2.15
Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway: 192.168.2.1

(192.168.2.1 is the IP address of my wireless router.)

As my FreeBSD laptop doesn't have wireless capability (and I am out of range of available ethernet cables) I am trying to set it up to connect to the internet via my Vista laptop, using an ethernet crossover cable between the two. Unfortunately, I don't really know how to do this. As I understand it, the crossover link between the two wired network cards needs to be in a different subnet to the wireless link between my Vista laptop and the router (since the FreeBSD laptop can't get to the router in one hop). So somehow my Vista laptop needs to be set up as a gateway between these two subnets, so that traffic from the FreeBSD laptop can go like this:

FreeBSD laptop <==[wired]==> Vista laptop <==[wireless]==> Router <==> Internet

So presumably the IP addresses would look something like this:

192.168.1.2 [FreeBSD, wired]
192.168.1.1 [Vista, wired]
192.168.2.15 [Vista, wireless]
192.168.2.1 [Wireless router]

This is how it is set up at the moment. I can ping 192.168.1.1 from 192.168.1.2 (so that connection works), but I can't figure how to get the Vista laptop acting as a gateway to enable 192.168.1.2 (the FreeBSD laptop) to reach the wider world.

Is this correct/possible? Am I doing something completely wrong? I'd appreciate any help please! Thank you :)

The gateway address for your FreeBSD machine will be the Vista machine wired address... 192.168.1.1.

Then on the Vista machine, run Regedit. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\TCPIP\Parameters and look for the key named IPEnableRouter. Change the value to 1. Save it and reboot the Vista machine. This will allow routing on your Vista machine.

In your router, you will need to add the static route for 192.168.1.0/24. The gateway address for this network will be the Vista machine's wireless adapter... 192.168.2.15.

Thank you, that looks like exactly what I wanted to know. Now I just need to figure out how to set up static routes on my router. I'm currently downloading the user manual from Belkin's support site; will let you know how I get on. :)

Please do. I have never tried enabling routing on a Vista machine. I have done so with Windows servers and XP. No need really. Sorry. I have quite a few managed switches that are Layer 3 and are quite capable of doing the job.

Just a thought. Check the power management configuration on your NICS. Make sure they are not turned off when your machine is idle for a while. There is usually not a power management on the wireless NIC but there definitely is on the wired ones.

Well, apparently my router is too crappy to support static routing, so this isn't going to work. Instead I've just moved the second computer into the next room and connected it to the router directly. Oh well, I was planning on getting rid of the router soon anyway. I guess this will do for now. :)