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.
