ICS question

My dad has both a laptop and a desktop at his house. His only internet access is through the Cingular wireless, so it's limited to his laptop... but he also wants to have the net on his desktop. I had it setup with a wireless card in his desktop, and internet connection sharing on the laptop to go from the internet connection to the ad-hoc network. However, that basically required recreating the ad-hoc connection everytime he wanted to use the desktop, which he doesn't want to have to do.

So I had him buy a crossover cable last time I was with him... but now I need help figuring out the best way to get it setup. If I have internet connection sharing setup on the laptop the same as before except with the wired port, will ics interfere with the network settings when he's at the office with it? He just connects with the ethernet connection there, and they have a DHCP server on the network.
Will he have to turn off ics everytime he goes to the office, and then re-enable it back at home? Or does ICS not run the DHCP server and what not when the connection being shared is disconnected?

He most likely will need to disable ICS everytime he goes into work. At the very least he will probably need to enable it everytime he comes home.

May I suggest using something like the analogX http proxy server on his laptop? That way he won't need to change his configuration all the time. Also, you could setup a wireless router or access point and have this sort of configuration work over the wireless.

Ah, yes, I completely forgot about proxies... something like that should work fine. I'll try it next time I'm over there.

Thanks!

Also, if he is going between work and home and having to switch configurations between static and DHCP, either use an alternate configuration, or you can use a pair of batch files containing netsh commands like so:

netsh interface ip set address "Local Area Connection" static 192.168.0.1 255.255.255.0 [gatewayaddress] [metric]

netsh interface ip set address "Local Area Connection" dhcp

The items in [] are optional for your setup, if you are using a proxy server. This is because the computer wont be acting as a gateway anymore. The metric should just auto set, which is probably what you want.

Setup AnalogX proxy on the laptop. Made two batch files, one for when he is at the office, which will kill the proxy and use DHCP on the ethernet connection. The other one starts the proxy and sets up a static address.
Seems to work quite nicely. Thanks for the help!