All our office computers except one had no internet connection for 3 days last week. A new cpu had been delivered and installed – a new i7 machine with Windows 7 OS. And the boss decided that the i7 machine should now be the central machine (previously, it was one of the XP machines) that will get connected to the only internet line alloted to our office, and share the connection to the rest of the office machines.
Now, all of the existing CPUs on our LAN were old ones with Windows XP as its operating system. Thus, we discovered as soon as we started fiddling with the Win7 i7’s configuration that we cannot share the internet connection the way we did before on the XPs. The Win 7 system requires that all other machines in the network should also be running Windows 7 in them. Ugh!
Software
The easiest solution would have been to just purchase a router. Our existing gadget is just a switch, not a router. Before we tried going that way, however, we decided to call the IT guys in the adjacent department. And he fiddled and twiddled around with the i7 machine. Meeting a blank wall too, he decided to do some digging around for an appropriate software for this purpose. Thus, on the third day, he installed the Kerio Winroute application (now called Kerio Control). The Kerio Winroute software gave us the much needed internet connection without too much sweat. It was installed only on the 64-bit ‘server’ machine (there was no need to install anything on the other computers). We used a trial version. The trial expired a day ago, but the feature that shared the internet connection still works.
Router
Me, I still think we’d still be better off with a router. That way, all computers would have internet connection even if the i7 ‘server’ machine is turned off. Also, wireless internet for laptops can be availed by anyone within the vicinity of our office.
I would have gone with the router as well James. It would have been a lot easier and saved a lot of headaches. Still, I’m not the one running the show 😉
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I guess applications like these are used by organizations/companies because they have features that allow for traffic shaping, monitoring, and controlling surfing activities. The key word is ‘control’. I heard that, except for a very few, most employees do not have access to youtube and facebook. I guess I know why. 🙂
yeah, because if they did they would never get any work done. 😉
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Exactly. 🙂
I’m not internet savvy nor techie but I think ours is a router as we don’t need to have a mother computer on to get connected to the internet. We’ve got 3 people in the house each with a PC or laptop. All we have to do is turn on the box and we can get connected. Oh by the way, the box is one of those D-Link ones.
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It’s a router all right. D-link is one of those established brands in the router market. And as an update to this post, we finally decided to get ourselves a router, a D-Link DIR-600, as we are not sure about the performance of the Kerio software after it expired.
Thank you for the informative topic.Please try to mention more router brands like Aztech,seimens etc
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Hi Sudeep! Thanks for the head up. 🙂 The thing is, I am just re-telling my experience in this post. And when I decided to show some router brands, I decided to show only those which I have had experience with. Of course, I may update this post soon and add other brands like the ones you mentioned. 🙂