Hi,

Don't want to start an OS war, but I use Windows 2K exclusively (we have
an ISP running exclusively on Win2K using a combo of custom and off the
shelf software) and may be able to throw some light on this..

Win98/99/ME Isn't designed to do anything of much in this area.. it is a
home user's platform, not a server platform so comparing it to Linux
really isn't valid in this case..

WinNT has some annoying problems with the TCP/IP stack and drivers.. The
inbuilt routing stuff wasn't the best.. But it could be beaten into
submission eventually if you didn't want to do anything too exotic :)
There were other packages from 3rd parties that did better. If all else
failed you could build the routing tables manually, NAT (network address
translation) was a problem though. I think the later service packs
helped a lot.

Win 2K is a dream!! It just works once you get used to what your doing
and what its expecting :) It is stable, fast and so easy to develop
complex application on.

We have several of our servers using Multiple NICs on not just the one
subnet, but the same IP address. This is a form of redundancy and also
load sharing.

This works because a lot of the modern switches understand this. We use
Intel switches and Dell servers. The server and the switch negotiate
some how and decide that each of the 100Mb channels are the same machine
so it will load share the data to it. Effectively you get a 200Mb link
to the server with 2 NICs. The OS just treats is as a single NIC -
almost, you can monitor it a tell if one of the NICs goes down.. Pretty
cool.

As for answering the question for the original poster, it _may_ (its
been a while since I've looked at this) be possible to use "Internet
Connection Sharing" to achieve what he was after (allowing access to his
PIC web server from the internet).

You will probably need to be running Win99 or WinME to get the version
of ICS that will do this for you though..

Give the PIC the an IP address on the private network address (say
127.0.0.5). Enable internet connection sharing on the dialup (it was a
dialup?, if not you may have problems getting ICS to work - can't
remember if this is possible) and then in the advanced properties
somewhere it is possible to forward particular ports to machines on the
private network. This is normally used for say a mail server.

Set up the forwarding so that port 80 (for instance) goes to 127.0.0.5
port 80 and it should then work - give people your IP address or name if
you have a fixed IP on your dial up and away you go. The traffic to port
80 will be automatically forwarded to the PIC web server.

If you need to support a web server on the gateway machine as well, then
give the PIC one a different port number.

Hope that helps
Ash.

> Actually, the multiple NICs on a single subnet is being suggested
> now by Intel and Microsoft. (Mind you, I'm not contradicting the
> above statement "just doesn't understand TCP/IP".)
>
> Only one card is active at a time. The second NIC is used as a
> fall-back for high availability servers. I suspect the automatic
> switch-over to the second NIC fixes random problem(s) while
> reinitializing the network stack.

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