Two NICS in one PC

[Michael J. Walters]

Ok so here is the deal. I have a student who has a computer with two wired NICS in it. One brings the signal from the jack in the wall. The other one he is trying to setup using an Ethernet cable to run from the second nic port to his xbox 360. He is currently using Windows XP SP3. Basically he wants to be able to no have to mess around and switch the Ethernet cords every time he wants to be on one or the other. We have tried setting up a shared connection on the main nic and tried running it that way. However, the automatic RESNET system at our school shut his internet port off for having 2 IPS coming from one port. If anyone would happen to have any ideas or clues as to how to get this working, I would be much obliged.

[Heironimus]

Set up "Internet Connection Sharing" on the XP machine. A Google search should turn up a lot of sites with detailed instructions on how to do it.

Or go out and buy a little cable/DSL router box and use that. That would be very simple, but it's probably overkill for an xbox in a dorm room.

[Michael J. Walters]

We tried this and the RESNET system shut off his internet port and it had to be reactivated.... Thanks though

[Pieter 't Hart]

hieronymous suggestion of using a router should work.

"RESNET system at our school shut his internet port off for having 2 IPS coming from one port"

does not apply.
the router separates the (multiple) ip-adresses on your "local lan" from the resnet network.
and communicaties using only one ip-adress on the uplink.

Maybe not a single ip-adress, but a single MAC-adress is allowed!
This could also explain why your student cannot swap cables (then also the resnet system shuts down the port).
This mac-adress could be hard configured in the resnet system (very likely when the NIC was suplied by the school).
It could also bee that this adress is only remembered for some time , then it would reset itself (but then again this timer could be set to a day or so).

Most NIC's have an option to change the MAC-adress (somewhere in advanced settings).
Seek a router that also has this feature.
Then you need to configure the original NIC's MAC-adress in routers NIC used for the uplink.

ps if you keep using the original nic on your network, this also needs a new mac-adress, else your router cannot communicate with this nic.

[Heironimus]

If your upstream connection saw two IPs on the port then you did not set it up correctly. The xbox would only have been visible to the outside if you were bridging or routing. You need to do a NAT, just like a typical residential cable/DSL subscriber would have to do to use multiple machines behind one IP.

[Alan_152]

A lot of the school Acceptable Use Policies frown on routers, and ICS is definitely a router. Perhaps the best suggestion at this point is to ask the resnet administrators for an acceptable way of doing this.