Sharing internet connection on multiple networks Windows Server 2008

Question

I have a server running Windows 2008 R2 x64 with a total of three network cards: one on-board, one PCI, and one Wireless USB dongle (D-link DWA-140). The on-board card is connected to the internet, the PCI one is connected to my cabled home network and currently the USB dongle isn't connected to anything.

What I'm trying to do is to enable DHCP on the USB dongle so I can connect to my server through wireless devices and connect to the internet through it.

I have tried a third-party program called Virtual Router, which successfully turned the USB dongle into a DHCP-enabled hotspot, but it did this by stealing the connection of the PCI-card so I would basically have to choose if I wanted to connect to the internet through the cabled net or wireless only.

I have also tried this solution to share an internet connection on multiple networks but I couldn't get it to work (just like the original poster), and since it required disabling ICS I couldn't even try Virtual Router when this was set up. I did manage to get internet connection through the cabled network though.

Can anyone help me? I never imagined it would be this hard to share an internet connection on multiple nets with windows, I did it just fine with cabled cards using FreeBSD once upon a time.

Answer 1

If you don't need to have 2 separate networks for some specific reason, the simplest way I guess would be to bridge the wifi and PCI card so they act as one and everything will work on the wifi as on the wired network (wifi connections will receive IP and other configs from the same DHCP server as the wired ones and be routed the same way).

Answer 2

Thank you laurent for that tip. I tried creating a bridge between the PCI-card and the Wifi-card and started the wifi hotspot by using the console commands

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=YourVirtualNetworkName key=YourNetworkPassword

netsh wlan start hostednetwork

but I never managed to get internet connectivity on both the cabled and wireless networks, I think that the culprit is the way that Microsoft has chosen to implement this hotspot-feature: First of all the wireless network connection (the one added to the bridge) isn't the one that's activated as an access-point. The one activated as a hotspot is the "Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter", and this one can't be added to the bridge. I read up a bit more on the feature and this article led me to believe that they never intended to allow this feature as anything but a range-booster for wireless networks.

So in short: You can't do it and a dedicated router is needed.