connect through the LAN, it doesn't. what's weird is that it used to work, on a straightforward install of windows xp with ICS! [}
] which leads me to my conclusion that Sentech MUST have changed something on their side that's preventing it from working
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I think that Sentech did change something relating to MTU sizes, probably about a month ago. But if your MTUs are correctly configured, you should have no problems. If the client systems (behind the Win2K gateway) can't connect to the SWG server then something else is wrong, and probably not on Sentech's side.
Anyway, assuming that everything on the Win2K gateway system works properly from *on* the Win2K system itself, the problem is likely a NAT (ICS) configuration problem, or a plain LAN setup problem.
First make sure that your LAN settings are correctly configured, i.e. that TCP/IP works correctly *within* the LAN, i.e. that it works between a WinXP machine on your LAN and the Win2K machine. The best way to do this is to ping between two machines.
Some basic TCP/IP debugging first (forgive me if you know the basics already but it's hard to tell from your posts): Use "Start/Run" and type "cmd" and press enter on both the Win2K gateway and on an XP system to open command prompts. Type "ipconfig" at the command prompt on both machines. Now make sure both have a valid but different (private class) network IP address, e.g. 192.168.X.X or 10.X.X.X for the *Ethernet adapter*. (If the two addresses do NOT look similar the networking *isn't* going to work ... for example if WinXP has auto-configured one of those 169. type addresses). In fact, for the two to be able to see each other, they technically need to be on the same "subnet". This means that they need to have the same "subnet address" (or TCP/IP "network address"). The "subnet address" is the bitwise AND of the IP address and the "Subnet Mask". So if your IP is 192.168.0.1 and your subnet mask is 255.255.0.0, your "subnet address" is 192.168.0.0. BOTH MACHINES must have the same subnet address.
Once you're sure both machines have IP addresses on the same subnet, try ping one from the other (and vice versa). At the command prompt of one enter "ping X", where X is the IP address of the other system. If both machines can ping another, and get valid replies, then your TCP/IP is working locally.
Sometimes pings work one way but not the other way (i.e. A can ping B but B can't ping A). This is usually a symptom of one of the two having a firewall and blocking incoming "ping" requests.
Anyway, next thing is to make sure your ICS is correctly configured. Firstly this means that the ICS client machines must be configured to use the Win2K system as the "default gateway". At the command prompt type "ipconfig /all" on e.g. an XP system. It should tell you the Ethernet controller's gateway, which should be the IP address of the Win2K machine. For Win2K ICS it should also tell you that the DNS server is the Win2K machine.
Note: Win2K ICS is supposed to create a "DHCP server", meaning that the Win2K system assigns IP addresses to the other machines every time they boot up. The "default gateway" and "DNS server" are also assigned to them along with the IP address (i.e. the Win2K server tells the others "use me as a DNS server and as your default gateway"). (DO NOT HAVE MORE THAN ONE ICS SYSTEM ON YOUR LAN. They might both try dish out IPs, and confusion will result.)
If the Win2K system was booted up after the WinXP systems, they won't have gotten valid IPs and would have defaulted to 196. crap. To renew the ICS client IP address at any time, use "ipconfig /renew".
Now if all of the above seems to be set up correctly, try ping the outside world from the XP system. At the prompt type "ping www.google.com" or "ping www.sentech.co.za". (If it doesn't work, make sure it does work from the Win2K gateway). If you can ping the outside world through the gateway, that's good.
(Note that this "gateway" is basically just "raw" forwarding of TCP/IP packets, so there is no proxy involved here, so make sure your web browser isn't trying to use a proxy. You can worry about proxies LATER on once everything else works *first*! In fact, same with firewalls; disable them all until you're sure that your basic network configuration is correct and works, THEN start setting up a firewall)
Once you can ping the outside world from an XP machine, try the web. Open www.google.com.
If web pages seem to "sort of start loading" but then just sort of hang and don't really load, it's almost certainly an MTU size problem. By default, the XP systems will try to send TCP/IP packets to the Win2K gateway using the default lan MTU size of 1500 bytes, which is too large. ALL the WinXP sytems must have their Ethernet MTU size set a bit smaller (I use 1412). Google for "DrTCP", download it, run it on the XP machines and set the LAN/Ethernet MTU to 1412. You may need to restart them. On the Win2K system itself (I also use Win2K Pro as gateway), I found I also had to set the "RAS MTU".
If you follow the above 'step by step', at which point do things stop working?
] However, I do not remember exactly what I did to make this worked. I truely thought that suggesting an alternate, non-microsoft way, would help ol' crazy bones out with his networking problems. Hell, it probably took me a constant 15 hours of pure work and trial/errrors to get **** working in that two-bit i-cafe