Recently, I established an ad-hoc wireless network between my desktop PC and my laptop, using the Microsoft home network and Internet Connection Sharing facility. Everything works well, except that I am only able to access a limited number of internet sites from the laptop. The Laptop is set up for the IP and DNS addresses to be allocated by the Desktop PC as host, and accesses the internet through the host’s TransAct broadband connection. Those internet sites that are accessible, which include the Microsoft sites, are found and displayed very quickly, but a large number of sites cannot be found. When they are called from the laptop, the desktop host sends and receives data to the ISP, presumably to the DNS server to obtain the sites IP address (I can see the data transfers from the network connections status pages on the host computer), but Internet Explorer on the laptop hangs up waiting for a ‘website found’ response, which never arrives. I thought of trying to connect to some of the websites that I cannot locate by using their numerical IP addresses directly from the laptop, thus avoiding the need to access DNS servers, but I do not know how to find the IP addresses. Internet Explorer 6 running on the desktop host works very well and quickly finds all websites. Do you have any ideas about how I should isolate this problem? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. The desktop is running Windows XP Home and the laptop is running Windows 98 SE with Internet Explorer 6.

It is a good idea to attempt to access the internet sites using the IP (internet protocol) address as this will determine if the problem is a DNS issue (the laptop cannot find the IP address of the given site from the domain address) or another issue. DNS is Domain Name System. Essentially, DNS is a system which facilitates the use of friendly web addresses to access websites. Each time you type in a web address (e.g., www.canberratimes.com.au) this is translated into the IP address for the site (a unique number which identifies the server for the web site e.g., 127.127.127.127). To find the IP address of a site, open a DOS command prompt and type ‘nslookup’ followed by pressing ENTER. This will start the nslookup utility. When it starts, your current IP address will be displayed. At the ‘>’ prompt, type the name of the site whose IP address you would like to find (e.g., www.google.com). If multiple IP addresses appear in response then you should be able to use any one of them to access the site. If you are interested, you can also do reverse lookups by typing the IP address which will return the hostname of the respective computer. To exit the utility type ‘exit’ and then ‘exit’ again to close the command prompt window. Once you have an IP address, which you have verified actually works by using your desktop computer to look up the website using the IP address, type it into the web browser on your laptop. If it works, you have a DNS problem. A reason that sites such as the Microsoft site appear, may be because these have entries in the HOSTS file. The HOSTS file should be located in your C:WINDOWS (if not, you can do a search - be aware the file has no extension). Contained within this file, are the hostname and IP address of sites. This allows for faster internet access as it acts as a cache of IP addresses (so, for example, each time you lookup www.microsoft.com, the IP address is already known in the HOSTS file, thus saving the time of looking up the IP address using a DNS server). You can manually add entries to this file but I never bother as the time saving is negligible. However, let’s try to fix the DNS problem you are currently experiencing!

If the websites load by using the IP address, then somehow your computer does not seem to be communicating with your ISPs DNS server. You mentioned that your client computer is set up so that the DNS settings are obtained automatically. Instead, try manually specifying the DNS address for your ISP. You will be able to find these settings on the host computer’s TCP/IP properties. However, if the settings on that machine are also set to automatically obtain the DNS server address then this doesn’t really help. In this case, or in the case that your ISPs DNS address does not fix the problem, set the DNS server to the IP address of the host computer. Windows should be automatically doing this when you enable the option to automatically determine the DNS server address (i.e., in Windows 98 this is achieved by simply enabling ‘Disable DNS’). If you are unsure of the host’s computer IP address, open a command prompt and type ‘ipconfig /all’.

However, if the problem doesn’t seem to be related to DNS (i.e., you enter the IP address of a website and the website does not load) then the actual cause of the problem is a bit of a mystery as I am unsure why the browser would load one website (e.g., microsoft.com) but not others. Make sure that any proxy servers are correctly configured in Internet Explorer. However, again, this does not explain why some sites load and some don’t. If you have reached this point, please contact me again for further guidance. Likewise, if the problem is solved please let me know as I would be interested to hear which point of the solution is the fix (as other users are also experiencing the same problem).