Help NETWORK techs.. PLEASE!

[vegascustoms]

ATTACHED is a network diagram am working on for a friend. Maybe it will be alittle fun for you if you have a couple minutes.



There is information in the diagram that explains the situation. But simply, they have a cable modem from charter. They have a wireless router. Instead of having the router connected to the cable modem in the same room, they mounted the wireless router centralized in their house for better overall wireless coverage, similar to an AP. Since most of their connections are from notebooks with WIFI, physical patch connections are not needed.



They want to add a HP network printer for direct IP printing. They can locate the printer in the same room as the cable modem. They donÂ’t want to have to buy a wireless print server, wireless bridge, or CAT 5 if they donÂ’t have to.



I guess the part that I am getting alittle fuzzy on is this. The cable modem has 1 ethernet port, which via cat 5 is connected to the wireless routerÂ’s WAN/Uplink port. There is regular lan ports on the wireless router as well for wired connections since the router is a switch as well.



My 1st thought is to use a basic Linksys 5 port switch(1 uplink/4 lan), connect the cat5 from the cable modem into one of the switch ports. Then connect the CAT5 into one of the switch ports that goes to the wireless routerÂ’s WAN.uplink port. Then connect the network printer via cat5 to the switch as well through one of the switchÂ’s portsÂ….. but heres where I am thinkingÂ…..



The wireless router has DHCP enabled. But I am not sure if routing and DHCP work via WAN or uplink ports..? Meaning, if I were to ping 192.168.1.30(network printerÂ’s IP), my notebook would go to my default gateway(the wireless router @ 192.168.1.1), but then IMCP would have to know that 192.168.1.30 is actually out the WAN/Uplink to the switch then to the network printer. And remember, wireless router and Linksys switch are nothing fancy, the switch is a simple L2 switch and the router can maybe do static route. Also, I am alittle unsure with this setup of what ports to use on the switch, it would make sense to connect the cable modem to the uplink of the switch, but then again maybe connected to one of the lan ports maybe enable broadcast across all ports. Im not sure what distinguishes the uplink/WAN port from the other lan ports on the switchÂ…Â….

 

[dishman]

idea

Strangely enough I have some information that may help you. I have been in a simelar situation. My grandma called me up because her "internet was broken" I made her answer a lot of questions and everthing sounded like it was hooked up correctly and configured right. So i drove from sacramento to the bay area and looked at her setup. She too is running a linksys wireless router. The problem was that she plugged her computer in to the wan port and the cable modem "internet in to one of the 4 switch ports. This made her internet work sometimes and sometimes not. So I can tell you that the routers rip or rip2 will make its way down the wan port to look for devices but in my case the connection was unstable. Your configuration is different but the ideas are somewhat the same. The router can interact with a device located on the wan port. Infact, now that I think of it, it was not the connection between the router and the computer on the wan port that was unstable, it was that the router had a hard time finding its internet ip address because the modem was not located on the wan port. I am excited to see how it works for you! Repost with your results! Rip is a wonderful thing. I think there is a chance that your config will work.