Major Networking Problem - A Texan in China

Hi...

After spending about three hours in this form I have determined that there are two issues... most of the participants are just about as knowledge-less as I am and support from Parallels comes rather slow. However, I feel I need to give this a go!

My brother sold me on getting into Mac about a month ago. Been a power user of XP since it came out and can get around really well in that environment. For a fellow who said "I wouldn't be caught dead using a Mac" my new Power Book Pro and my new 20" iMac have both made me very happy! (see.... I'll admit when I'm wrong! )

I have spent about a month working on the iMac and Power Book Pro as time permitted but my real work stayed on my PC. I did buy Parallels 3.0 at the same time I bought the Power Book Pro and was just trying to see how much of my daily work routines I could do on the Mac environment before making the switch. I finally discovered that several of my more frequently used programs can not be matched with OS X 10.5.5 software so decided to Migrate my PC to my Macs. This including upgrading both Macs to 500 GB hard drives and increasing the RAM to 4 GB on each box.

There are some extreme differences between the hardware available on my PC as opposed to what is available on the two Macs and I do think this is where the trouble I am having, starts.

My Macs come with one Firewire Port, two USB ports on the Power Book (three USB ports on the iMac), one Ethernet port on each of the Macs plus the Hard drives (one 500 GB internal on each unit) and on 500 GB external on each unit.

My PC has three Ethernet Ports (I am using two as you will see later) eight USB ports and so on and so on.

My company system is all PCs running XP (until I purchased the two Macs) This equates to seven computers on a "Windows Workgroup"

Prior to starting the Mac experience my network was set up this way.

The office computer is named Master and also has two Ethernet cards. The IP for Master is 192.168.0.1 and four of the other computers (each with only one Ethernet Card) connect to the Internet via Master's Internet connection by looking for the Gateway 192.168.0.1. The Internet connection is a Dialup ADSL system that requires a user name and password. The ISP provides a small launch program that remembers your password and dials into the ADSL system which doesn't happen very often since Master is left on 24 hours a day.

The Ethernet card in Master for the ADSL connection is on automatic DHCP. The other ethernet card on Master is manually set with IP, DNS and such for the local area network. All other computers on the network connect through Master with Master being the gateway at 192.168.0.1..... except for mine and my wife's computers.

My wife's and my computers both also have two ethernet cards. One for the "Workgroup" and one for the ADSL connection (just like Master is set up) since the internet connection gets pretty slow if we are all on line at the same time. The way we separate ourselves from not using Master's Internet Connection is just not showing anything in our "Gateway" box... it is blank. So one of our Ethernet cards is manually set up for the "Workgroup" with no Gateway designation and then we both have the same type Modem and dialer program as is used by Master.

Again... what we have here is seven computers on the "Windows Workgroup" network (by the way, all boxes run with Windows XP Professional) with five of the seven connecting to the Internet through "Master" and two connecting to the internet independently.

When I decided to switch to the Macs I realized I had several problems and but I thought I could overcome them with Parallels...

First problem is that the small program that dials to the ISP is written for PC and of course is an .exe file and won't run on the Mac... so first question is how to connect to the Internet. I own and operate orphanages in rural China and our ISP does not have a version of the dialer that is written for Mac.

In my oh so far thinking mind I thought that once I had installed Parallels I could just use my Virtual XP to take care of the dialing for connecting to the internet... and let my Mac's Airport keep me connected to the "Workgroup" in our system...

Not so... as of now, as long as I don't run Parallels and Virtual XP I can access the Workgroup and use Master's gateway to get on the Internet.

However, as soon as I activate Parallels and Virtual XP I loose all connectivity. I am set up with the following settings.



The above screen capture shows that I am indeed set up on shared networking. (Right now I have no cable attached to my Ethernet card since I can't see any way to run the connection program.

The other screen captures show the different pages from my networking preferences.







....and the URL for two more since four images are all that is allowed in one post. (Good rule by the way)

http://gongyi.homeofhope.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/fourth.jpg

http://gongyi.homeofhope.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/fifth.jpg

Needless to say, I haven't even started messing with the Mac Book Pro as yet.

In a nut shell what I want to do is have my iMac (Both OX X 10.5.5 and XP Professional) connect to the Internet independently and also be connected (in and out) to the Windows Workgroup. At this point I am starting to think this
is not possible in which case I can live with using Master's gateway to connect to the Internet as long as both OS X and XP can do that as well as both of them be on the Workgroup network. It doesn't matter to me if this connection is done by Airport or by Ethernet card and cable.

Please someone help?

Thank You!

 

> Not so... as of now, as long as I don't run Parallels and Virtual XP I can access the Workgroup and use Master's gateway to get on the Internet.

> However, as soon as I activate Parallels and Virtual XP I loose all connectivity.

How does it appear? You can't access neither Internet nor other Workgroup machines from neither Mac nor WinXP while Parallels is running?

I'd definitely would be more helpful if you were running the Parallels Desktop 4.0, since about PD30 I know very little and the PD40 has powerlful mechanism of Problem Reports that allows to send for investigation almost all required logs.

But let's try.

So far It seems to me that there is a problem (conection to the network is lost by some reason while the PD is running) and a wish to connect to the Internet using the XP VM.

Could you please create a support ticket and post me its number? Alternatively you can post me via forum private message your email address and I will create a ticket for you.

 

I have created a support ticket. Please post me a message if you have not received the mail or if it is empty.

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