Adding a second network card (dedicated connection to a network music streaming device) to a PC already on a home wireless network

Question

I have a pretty normal home wireless network with a combined adsl modem/router which all my (Windows XP/Vista) computers use DHCP to connect wirelessly to and share resources among each other in a windows workgroup.

One of my PCs in particular which is running Windows XP has a wireless USB dongle which it uses to connect to the adsl router at the moment. This PC also has a wired ethernet card in it, unused at the moment.

I would like to use the wired ethernet card in this PC to connect the PC directly to a network music streaming box (a Slim Devices Squeezebox). I don't need the Squeezebox to be able to connect to the internet, solely just to connect to the music streaming server running on the PC I want to connect it to via wired ethernet.

So on this PC I have my wireless network USB Dongle set up in Windows XP so it uses DHCP to connect to the wireless adsl router, i.e. "Obtain an IP address automatically". The wireless adsl router is 192.168.1.1 and is configured to give out DHCP address to clients between 192.168.1.100 and 192.168.1.254.

To connect the Squeezebox to this PC via the wired ethernet card in the PC (the PC's second network interface), how should I set up the static IP and subnet mask setting for both the wired network card in the PC and the squeezebox?

Solution

Well, it should be sufficient to set up the pc wired network card statically as

IP: 192.168.2.1 
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Default gateway: leave blank
DNS: leave blank

And the squeezebox as

IP: 192.168.2.2 
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.2.1
Broadcast: 192.168.2.255 (if asked for)

If you want to have DNS resolution on your swingbox - i.e. for access to Internet stuff - then just bridge your wired and wireless connections in "Network Connections" by selecting the wired and wireless cards, right clicking and selecting the "Bridge" option. You will then need to supply the IP of your DNS servers as used by your router to the swing box.