Sharing dial up wirelessly

[Gemini]

Here's the deal: what is the best and least complicated way to share dial up? We have two iBooks and an eMac.

Option A: Airport Extreme with modem. How does this work? Does it dial in anytime a computer requests a dial up connection, or when I tell it to?

Option B: Airport Express and an Extreme card on the eMac. Problems with this is, can you turn off DHCP on the Airport express so that the eMac makes the network and handles the DHCP, can you make it easy to enable sharing and connect on the eMac, and can you make it so that if someone fast user switches on the eMac it doesn't disconnect the modem?

Option C: The above, minus the Airport Express.

Notes: The iBooks seem to reach entire house when one is sharing and the other roaming around. They don't reach very far out into the yard. (We have a big yard.) Will the eMac have the same range or better, and would the eMac and Airport Express work together and combine their ranges if DHCP was disabled on the Express and left to the eMac? Can Expresses even join ad-hoc networks?

I need my parents to be able to easily control this. Could sharing and network creation be easily handled with an AppleScript?

What are the problems and strengths of the above configurations?

If this post is incoherent or otherwise odd, blame the new year's champagne.

 

[mduser63]

Unfortunately I'm probably not as well able to answer this question as other will be, but I'll tell you what I'm doing. I have a D-Link wireless router running my network. I have a Powermac G4 hardwired to the router, and a Powerbook and WinXP PC connected via wireless whenever they're turned on. All three computers have dialup connections, but obviously only one can be connected at a time, so if more than one needs to be connected at once, I use wireless sharing to do the job. I have set all of the computers to have fixed IP addresses on the LAN (DHCP isn't used at all). Usually the WinXP computer connects directly to the 'net, so I've got internet connection sharing turned on on that machine. The other two are set up to use its shared connection by having the WinXP PC's IP address set as the router address in the Macs' network preferences. This setup works pretty well. I think it would work better if I had an Airport Extreme so I could connect that directly to the net, and connect all three computers that way, because it's somewhat annoying to have to depend on another computer for your internet connection.

As for your question about the modem disconnecting during fast user switching, go to the PPP tab on the internal modem section of network preferences, then click "PPP options." There's a checkbox that says "Disconnect when a user logs out." Make sure that's not checked, and the modem will stay connected even when you switch users.