Synergy on daft double network setups

I thought networking was super duper easy these days. Guess not. This is a bit of a long rant so settle in.

I had a very over subscribed wireless network in my flat, mainly down to me downloading lots of torrents which I then move to my NAS, from which I'm almost constantly watching aforementioned downloads. The NAS was previously attached to the wireless router, and my two laptops and mac mini all connected to the router using these magic wireless rays.

I decided I'd have a little local wired network for my computers and hard disk (no-one else uses it). It was a bad idea.

This seemed simple. It was the only solution given the equipment I had at hand, so it was the one I went for. In fact, it works! However I have more annoying demands than this. I use 'Synergy' to use all three of my machines from a single keyboard and mouse. This was another compelling reason for a wired network as the wireless wasn't really good enough for it. This is also what caused most problems.

Getting Windows machines to talk to each other without a router (the DHCP portion of it, in particular) seems actually harder than it was with previous versions (XP / even 98). Windows insists that a network as such be given the 'public network' rules, which make some things harder. For some reason the machines can't ping each other while in this 'public network', and Synergy can't connect by ip either.

The way I got around it, in the bizarre event that anyone has the same problem, is to set the following options.
Machine 1: IP 10.1.1.1 subnet 255.0.0.0 gateway 10.1.1.3 (doesn't exist)
Machine 2: IP 10.1.1.2 subnet 255.0.0.0 gateway 10.1.1.3 (still doesn't exist)
Machine 3: IP 10.1.1.5 subnet 255.0.0.0 gateway 10.1.1.3 (...)
hard disk on auto (seems to work)

The weird trick seems to be that Windows 7 only lets you define a 'home' or 'work' network if you specify a gateway. Even if the gateway doesn't exist. Once I got this set up (finally), Synergy agreed to talk. Another point, don't use the Synergy 1.4.5 beta. It's shit. 1.3.8 is harder to set up but it works much better. The beta gave me very intermittent success.

Of course, the sensible solution would have been not to attempt any of this.

For the price of a 5 metre ethernet cable, everything could be on one simple automagically managed network. No hassles here, plus the hard disk becomes accessible to the whole network through the wireless, while [in theory] still maintaining a speed advantage for locally (wired) connected machines.

I felt like an idiot doing this, and it took many hours. But it works. And Synergy works much better wired than wireless. Plus with the static IPs, Synergy can start automatically and have no bother finding it's mate.

I will be buying a cable though...