Adventures in Networking

This week I'm staying at Sarah's place, due to her mother being in Melbourne. This is awesome, but with one small problem - Internet connectivity.

She has a computer, and a modem. No router, nothing. No phone reception, so that tethering access through a phone is also out.

Why is this a problem? Well, she and I both got addicted to Terraria, and have been playing decent amounts of it in an online server (run intermittently by Sarah), along with Shinji (one of the madboard RPers). I cannot access the server without a means to reach the Internet - and therein lay our problem.

As a result, I set about working on finding a cheap solution to share her Internet connection, hopefully without a router (since neither of us were willing to fork out the money for one of those - and, more importantly, I lack decent networking skills).

I mentioned this quandary to a colleague, who pointed out that I would be able to use ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) on her computer, and share it using a USB to Ethernet adapter. It made sense to me, and a quick Google revealed that they're not particularly expensive, so during my lunch break on Monday, I dashed off to Capitol Square to find me an adapter (dragging two coworkers with me).

I found (or rather, was recommended) a particular device by one of the workers in one of the many, many computer shops there. Having been there a while with no luck, I paid for it, and we headed back to the office. That evening, I tested the device out... and it did nothing. It turns out the stupid thing I bought wasn't supported beyond Windows XP - and therefore no drivers existed. I searched for about an hour for a generic driver, but to no avail.

Tuesday, at lunchtime, I ran back down to the computer shop (alone this time) and got my money back. I was told by the guy that they would have Win7 compatible adapters in by the next day. Thanking the guy, I walked about 5 meters away to the next shop, where I promptly was recommended a Win7 compatible device, paid for it, and returned to the office.

When I got the new device home, it worked a charm. 20 minutes after plugging it in, we had shared internet running on my laptop, from Sarah's PC. And then we played Terraria for a few hours.