how do you bridge internet connections at 2 different houses?

[justin pierce]

i am trying to bridge my internet connection with my friends at two different locations. how do you do this/ is it possible?
thanks for your response. how do you do this (Virtual Private Network)
i have my xbox 360 bridged to my computer and so does my friend. i have been told that if you bridge both of our connections we can play each other all the time b/c i can block everybodys ip but his

[pithen]

Do you mean that you're trying to share your internet connection with your friends in different locations? Short of running a Cat5 cable out your window, down the street, and in their window, no, it's not possible.

If you're looking to connect your home network with your friend's home network, and both of you have internet access, then what you are looking for is called a VPN (Virtual Private Network)

[bostonianinmo]

Why would you possibly want to do that?? What exactly are you trying to do?

If you're trying to aggregate your bandwidth, don't waste your time. The cost of the hardware to do that will far exceed the cost of getting a faster connection from both of your ISPs. That's enterprise-class stuff and the hardware will run into thou$and$.

If you're just trying to access each other's networks across the internet, set up a VPN between your homes. You'll either need a VPN firewall such as a Cisco PIX 501 at each end or look into some open source solutions such as IPCop http://www.ipcop.org

If you go the IPCop route (it's what I use) you'll need a spare PC on each end to install IPCop on to.

Either way, your internal IP scheme must be different on each end, and you must have a static public IP from your ISPs -- or at least a dynamic IP that rarely changes.