The internal LAN should be set to any of the common non-routable IP address ranges, such as 192.168.x.y. The ISP-connected machine's LAN NIC IP address should be specified as the Gateway IP address for the other machines on the LAN.

In order to use the internet from the LAN machines, you will need to enable internet connection sharing in the ISP-connected machine.

It will be easier to get this working if you first disable your local network-attached NIC, and get the ISP-connected machine completely working first. Then deploy your LAN.

Multi-homed setups with ICS like this are problematic, though, and I'd recommend that you simply use the router as the single point of contact to the the ISP, with all the PCs as peers on the LAN side of the router.

Jim

The problem was my router wasnt port forwarding so I could run my webserver, so that's why I went the route I'm on now with the 2 NICS...

Do you have any idea why I could ping out, but not browse, irc, ftp, email, etc? What could be stopping that?

Also, on my LAN NIC, what should I specify as my gateway, ip, dns, etc... 192.* as the IP i'm sure, as well as default subnet, but what about gateway and dns servers? ... on the network machines, should I set them as a static IP, 192.*, and if so, what should I use for their gateway, subnet, dns, etc?

However, if you have a mixed WinXP/Win2k/WinME/Win98 OS environment, then don't do that -- DHCP often causes problems with file and printer sharing in mixed-OS environments.

If you don't want to use DHCP, then assign the ISP-connected machine's LAN IP as 192.168.0.1, and set the other machines to use that address as the gateway. Assign 192.168.0.1 as their gateway addresses. Use the same DNS server IP addresses as you have set in the ISP-connected machine.

Assign each LAN-side machine a unique address in the 192.168.0.2-254 range. I guess I should mention that I'm assuming the default netmask of 255.255.255.0 here.

The ability to ping but not use other protocols sounds like a DNS problem, assuming that you're pinging IP addresses. However, if you are pinging by domain name, then those domains may have been cached in your local DNS cache, and therefore are working even though network DNS is not working. One way to test this is to go to Start->Run enter "Cmd", and then type "ipconfig /flushdns" in the DOS command window. This will flush your local DNS cache, and if the main problem is DNS, then your pings by domain name will all fail, while pings by IP address will still work. However, this would still leave you with the question of why ICMP (ping) works, but other protocols don't...

Again, the process will be much easier if you disable your ISP-connected machine's LAN-side NIC, and get just that machine working on the internet first. You can go to View Network Connections and right-click-disable the LAN-side NIC to isolate the 'two sides' of the ISP-connected machine.

As to your router, I'll have to refer you to the router manufacturer's Web site for information on how to do port-forwarding with it -- There are simply too many variations in router setup to guess about it here.

HTH,
Jim

Any ideas on why I wouldn't be able to hit outside?
I've input all of the IPs as my ISP has given me, but still no luck. Their DNS servers aren't down because my inlaws aren't having issues and they live right behind me, and hit the same tower (we're on wireless)

And again, disabling the LAN-side NIC on the ISP-connected machine will help to break this problem up into smaller chunks if the above doesn't help.

To be clear, the ISP-connected machine is the (internet) gateway for your LAN. The wireless modem (probably on your roof) is the gateway for the ISP-connected machine.

Jim