Windows – Configuring a LAN-WAN routing using Windows 2003 Server

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I have an Internal LAN and an WAN Connectivity in my office. The followings are the statistics for the two:

LAN IPs: 192.168.50.1 – 192.168.50.5/24
WAN IP: Assigned by the ISP using DHCP

I connected two LAN Cards in one of my PCs among those I connect WAN connection in one and connect LAN in other LAN Card with the IP 192.168.50.1/24. I use no default gateway in the server's LAN adapter.

I want to use this only one WAN connection for the all 5 PCs in my Office. Could any one please tell the full step by step configuration of both the server side and the client side so that I can establish the WAN connection from all the 5 PCs of my office?

If you need to know any more please let me inform. I am a novice in NETWORKING. Please help me as soon as possible for all of you.

Regards.

Best Answer

This is a pretty straightforward configuration. While you can use your Windows Server machine to perform network address translation for the PCs on your network, I'd recommend purchasing a NAT firewall / router device. One of the consumer-grade Linksys devices, for example, would suit you fine.

To configure your Windows Server machine to act as a NAT router for your PCs:

  • Start Routing and Remote Access Service from the Administrative Tools program group

  • The "Routing and Remote Access Setup Wizard" will start.

  • Choose "Network Addres Translation (NAT)"

  • Select the appropriate interface for the public interface. Leave "Enable security on the selected interface by setting up a Basic Firewall" checked.

  • Specify the LAN IP address of the server computer as the default gateway for PCs.

Edit:

I'd have to see your config hands-on to tell you much more. I've set up W2K3 as a demand-dial LAN router with success in the past. Make sure you can manually connect before you try configuring the demand-dial interface.

If you're being billed per-call or per-minute you're going to have to do some work figuring out what kinds of IP filters to add to keep the server from making excess calls.

In the past I've tended to use purpose-built devices for this function because they generally worked better (more reliable, more configurable) than Windows Server. Most of those devices aren't on the market anymore, so that's probably a losing strategy anyway.

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