Dorm room networking

Ok, here's the problem. Last year during the school year I used the ethernet box in my dorm room to connect to my school's network to get online. This year I wanted to connect a wireless router(Belkin 3-port) to the box and connect through that. This way i could wirelessly access the network around my room and also get online with my ipaq without using an ad-hoc connection which required my laptop to be on as well.
I can connect fine using both the laptop and ipaq, wired and wireless. Now the problem is that I cannot access the other computers on the network to share files. I didn't even think about this before adding the router and I would really like to be able to share files and keep the router. Technically, we are not supposed to use routers in our rooms, but since I have encrypted my wireless network and am not sharing the connection I don't see the problem with it. Is there a way to get onto the network without giving away the fact that I am using a router?

My first guess would be that you are experiencing a name resolution issue. When you were connecting directly to the school's network you were probably on the same subnet as the rest of the machines that you were sharing with. Becuase of this, mapping to shares, etc. works pretty easily.

Becuase you now have the router in the middle, even with the gateway address correct, I think you're going to have a problem getting the name resolution to work well, if at all.

One way you may be able to get around this is using an lmhosts file. The lmhosts file keeps a "mapping" of host/pc-names to IP Addresses. What you may want to do, as a test, is to get the IP address of a PC you are trying to connect to, and create an entry in your local lmhosts file. There is an example in the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc folder called lmhosts.sam. Add both the IP address and the PC name of the computer into your lmhosts file and save it as just "lmhosts" into that folder. (I'm almost sure you don't want the .sam at the end, but you can try it both ways). See the lmhosts.sam file for example syntax. For your REAL entry lines, do not start them with the "#". Example:

192.168.0.1 myPC1 #PRE

If this works for you (hope it does), then keep in mind if the PCs that you are trying to connect to may be on DHCP and their IP addresses may change at times (possibly often). When that happens, you'll need to update the effected lmhosts file entries too.

There is probably a way to do this via some sort of dynamic-dns solution too, but I'm not exactly sure how you'd pull that off.

Are you using your router as a router? or an access point? My guess is that you have your college internet coming in to the "internet port" on your router. Which is probably also using DHCP to give your laptop and the iPaq an indivdual IP address under your routers rules. Which will yes, because of the fact that your are on a totally different IP string as the rest of your college, you will be excluded from their network. What you need to do is either return your router for a WAP (Wireless Access Point) or see if your router has the option to be a wireless access point. That way you can also use WEP encryption, and Hide your SSID, which makes it invisible to wireless users. this way your using a college IP address, and you'll still be on they're network while having the flexablility of being wireless.