Need Help: Firewire networking on T42 w/pcmcia card

[eliu]

All right, so I already plan on using firewire to connect my PC and my laptop. The distances involved will be very very short b/c it'll be for a college dorm. Moreover, I can't use my own wireless (school would eat me alive if they found out--it's in the rules of internet use or whatnot). And I got the firewire (cardbus card + cable) for cheap from a friend; PC has firewire through an Audigy sound card.

Anyhow, I just tried hooking this thing up...it kind of works. If I keep my home LAN and firewire connections un-bridged on the PC, then the laptop/PC can do file-sharing A-OK (I assigned them separate IPs--192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.2 for PC/laptop respectively). That's great...this is exactly what I'll be using in college.

Hopefully someone can help me w/this...I'm sure it's a really stupid problem, but I just can't figure it out.

However...I'm still at home for 3 more weeks, and I would like to be able to access the rest of my home network & get internet sharing on the laptop. So if I bridge the firewire & home LAN connections on the PC...that happens...sort of. It's just that after about 10 minutes, the internet just dies. File sharing stays alive though. I really don't know what's going on here...nor how to fix it

There was a thread on Anandtech forums about a similar problem and the solution was to put the two things (ethernet/firewire) on separate subnets. But I can't figure out how to do that. If the firewire isn't part of the bridge, then that's easy enough...but when it becomes part of the bridge, I can't seem to give it it's own thing...

Oh btw...if I pull the cardbus card out of the laptop (IBM T42) and put it back in, internet comes back (but only for another 10 minutes).

Thanks,
-Eric