How to share an Internet Connection?

[annu2375]

I am havin an internet connection with single login access and I want to share it through HUB but when I talked to the Internet Service provider they said that you can do it through proxy server but when I tried it failed please help its urgent

[bLur]

i shared mine using a router, either wireless or wired. proxy server is very unfamiliar to me. anyway using a router was easier, just plug it to your modem and connect your computer(s) to the port of router.

[none7]

What proxy did you use, by the way?
There are two basic ways to share a Net connection. Way one is via a proxy server, way two is via Network Address Translation (NAT).
Possibly the most popular proxy for the Windows platform used to be WinProxy, which is commercial software but has a free 30 day evaluation version. It's got a friendly setup wizard, and it lets you individually assign particular permissions to particular clients. For instance, some clients can have HTTP access only, or just mail and FTP, or whatever combination you like.
Network Address Translation (NAT) is simpler to use than proxy software. It provides automatic translation of incoming and outgoing data, and you have to do less fiddling with the clients to make them work with it. Like a proxy, a NAT setup runs on the computer (or other appliance) that physically connects the network to the Internet, but unlike a proxy, it does practically no processing of the data, and stores none of it locally.
The most popular NAT software in the Wintel world today, judging by the number of people who could be using it if they wanted to, is the Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) feature which is built into Windows 98 Second Edition and later - WinME and Windows 2000 have it, too. Only the computer that's actually got the Internet connection needs to have a Windows version with ICS installed; the other machines can be anything that can use TCP/IP.

Internet Connection Sharing is actually an excellent, nothing-more-to-buy way to get your shared Net connection working, provided you're just connecting a simple LAN to the Internet. It includes a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server that can dole out IP addresses to all computers on the network. So out-of-the-box Windows installations with TCP/IP installed should just work, automatically, provided you don't mind using the local 192.168.0.x IP addresses which ICS sets up by default.

If you install ICS and some or all of the machines on the network were previously set up to use a proxy, you'll have to manually clear the proxy setting, or ICS won't work. If you're installing on a network that didn't previously have any kind of shared Internet access, though, this won't be a problem.

You may run into difficulties with ICS if your network configuration changes, though. For instance, if you take the ICS server machine and plug it temporarily into a network that has its own DHCP server. The ICS DHCP server turns itself off when it detects another DHCP server on the network, but making ICS work again afterwards without reinstalling Windows can be... well, it can be a challenge. Microsoft's off- and on-line documentation for ICS is copious, but unhelpful.

There are other cheap Windows NAT packages, like for example the $US25 shareware program NAT32, the evaluation version of which will only run for an hour at a time and is missing some of the newer features, but is good enough to illustrate the principle. WinGate and SyGate are another couple of popular NATs with downloadable evaluation versions, and they're both more capable and less mystifying than the Microsoft option. It's actually worth downloading SyGate just for its documentation, which explains the whole deal a lot better than Microsoft's skimpy ICS docs.

and list of proxies to use:

http://www.winproxy.com/


http://www.analogx.com/contents/download.../proxy.htm