Yesterday my girlfriend got us two network cards and a cable, so I could hook up our computers and let her share my ADSL internet connection, instead of the painfully slow modem.
So I spent pretty much the whole night setting it up. Part of my problems were jumping the gun and installing opaque proxy software (Wingate, especially) before getting networking to work properly between the two machines. However, near dawn, I found an exhaustive site telling me how to easily and simply set up Internet Connection Sharing, using nothing but Windows itself, and there was much joy.
This was cut short in the morning, when my girlfriend discovered that she couldn’t use her Hotmail account. Or connect to her Bank’s online service. Apparently, ICS doesn’t work properly with HTTPS connections.
So I spent some time looking for solutions. They are fairly sparse online, although some people have noticed the problem, and one guy has a solution which only requires a small proxy server application to be installed…
However, if I’ve learned anything last night, it’s not to rush off and install new software before exhausting the full capabilities of my OS. A lot of Windows software, I feel, was written to solve problems that troubled old versions of the OS, and which magically disappeared in newer versions.
One site pointed me at this
laconic snippet of Windows 2000 Documentation, which describes how Windows 2k itself can work as a proxy. There’s more on that in this Windows 2000 tips page.
I’m eager to try this out tonight, but first – a gaming session. With Jake, who I owe an article already…