🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi folks,

I'm trying to set up a home network consisting of two PCs, in order to 
share the one dial-up connection I have on one of them. I've tried 
several different configurations but it still won't work - please help me 
out with this.

Here's the setup: one PC running Win2000 (the dial-up connection is setup 
on this one) and another (much older) PC running Win95. (No point further 
upgrading that one anyway.)
I've bought 30 m (some 90 ft. I believe) of crossover cable and connected 
the two PCs.
I've installed (if it wasn't already) NetBEUI and TCP/IP on both PCs, set 
their IPs to 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2, respectively (subnet mask: 
255.255.255.0), set the Win2000 machine (192.168.0.1) as the default 
gateway, added (if not already there) "Client for MS Networks" and "File & 
Printer Sharing", set up a common workgroup, added on the Win2000 PC 
another user named exactly as the default user on the Win95 machine (and 
with the same - blank - password) because some guys on the 'net said it 
would be a good idea. Also I've created an entry for each PC in both the 
hosts file and the lmhosts file on both computers (disabling WINS and 
specifying to use LMHOSTS instead). All to no avail; NETBIOS names aren't 
translated to IP adresses, and pinging another PC by its IP number won't 
work either.
Needless to say, there isn't any "personal firewall" running that could 
block requests.
Now here are some more specific questions:

- Do I need to have NETBEUI installed at all? Not necessarily, according 
to my previous experience with Win95/WinNT networks, however those were 
large corporate networks with dedicated DNS servers, WINS servers, 
gateways etc. With my 2-PC-network I tried it both with and without 
NETBEUI (that is, with only TCP/IP as the default protocol), with no 
success either way.

- Enable NETBios over TCP/IP or not? I've actually tried both already in 
different configurations; no luck.

- Enable or disable DNS? Since I've no DNS server software running on 
neither PC, it seemed obvious to me to disable it; I also tried a 
configuration with DNS enabled, but no DNS server specified, and still 
another one when I specified the Win2000 machine as DNS server. None 
worked.

- I hear contradictory stuff about "Master browsing". Indeed, on the Win95 
system there are to options (variables) that can be set up under "File and 
Printer Sharing": the first one (the upper one) is called something like 
"LM-Service" (default: "No") and another one below it called something 
like "Browsing" (default: Auto). I can't tell the exact English names 
because I'm actually running the German version of Windows. Should I 
change any of these two values?

- Finally, anything obvious I might have overlooked? Any way to test the 
cable itself?

Thanks a bunch - any suggestions would be highly appreciated!

TIA,

Andrei