The Lonesome Road

All right - I need a little help here.

I have two systems at home - one’s mine and one belongs to my sis. Now, when we got our net connection, only my PC was in use. Later on, we decided to split the net connection between the two PC’s by making mine a proxy server.

Thus, I have two NIC’s on my computer. One NIC connects to my ISP. It’s configured and bound to a static IP address. The second NIC connects to my sister’s PC. The NIC’s that connect my sister’s PC and mine are both on static class C addresses.

This arrangement was working fine till I installed SP2 on my PC. Then something happened and connectivity was totally lost. The two computers cannot even ping each other. I thought it may be due to conflicting Windows, so I put SP2 on the other comp as well - but to no effect. The problem still remains.

For a while I thought there was a problem as I already had a firewall and SP2 installs Windows Firewall. I disabled the built in firewall from the connection, and then disabled both firewalls, but to no avail.

I also tried switching cables, but again it’s a no-go. I’ve also tried re-installing the NIC’s and associated services and protocols.

If anyone can give me a little help here I will be grateful.

Secondly, regarding the chat server that I am implementing - the buffer problem is a major headache as the server has top priority, but all the clients have an equal priority to send. So what happens is if multiple clients try to send data - there is usually a buffer flood problem and there are delays in messages and loss of data. I don’t want to implement a system where everyone has a turn to send data and the others have to wait. I’m not very sure on how to implement a polling process - in fact absolutely no idea - and nor does my prof. Is there a better solution?

Last two days have been peaceful and relaxed. Been going full steam on my GRE. Been scoring 780/800 in verbal adaptive tests. Need to work on math though.

Finally, today is Teacher’s Day - so, to everyone who’s taught me anything -a big Thank You