jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Mon Feb 20 11:41:54 CST 2012
I have a SOHO. Yesterday the cable company came in to replace the cable modem and replaced it with an integrated modem / router / wireless. I like it! It has guest networks and so forth, very modern. I use 192.168.122.1 as that base router's IP and the range 10-100 as the addresses dished out to computers, and I set all that up, turned on encryption, set the SSID to C2Db1, all the typical setup stuff. I have a pair of wrt54gs routers / wireless. I have in the past put them on the network as access points on either end of the house to allow better wireless access around the house. I know how to turn off DHCP server in the access points, set the IP of the access point router to a fixed address, for which I use 192.168.122.2 / .3 etc. I set the SSID to unique values C2Db2 and C2Db3 so I can identify each one for connecting. So I set up two of these "access points" using two wrt54gs routers with the wan / DHCP turned off. In point of fact, now that I think of it, I do not know how to specifically "turn off" the WAN, I just don't use it, connecting all cables to the switch side of the device. So now comes the strange thing. I rebooted and my laptop's wired NIC says it is connecting to the Local Area Connection C2Db3. That should not be possible, since C2Db3 is not the DHCP server. C2Db3 is one of the WRT54GS routers which is now only a switch and wireless access point. The laptop does not connect to C2Db3 (directly) though C2Db3 is plugged into the same gigabit switch as the laptop (up in my office). The connection does work, and it gets out to the internet, it is just confusing to me. I expected that all of my computers with wired connections to switches would show C2Db1 as the network, and any wireless NECS would show the name of the wireless access point that they came in under. Just as an aside, the "show network map" fails miserably and immediately. All of my switches are dumb (unmanaged) so I was really only expecting perhaps a basic picture of the network, but nope, nothing at all except an error message. Just as an aside, I have an 8 port gigabit in my office on the second floor at one end of the house, connected to a 4 port gigabit switch in the basement at the center of the house. That 4 port is connected to the new cable modem / router to get at the internet, and is also connected to an 8 port gigabit switch at the other end of the house (relative to my office). I recently "wired the house" (myself) putting boxes in the walls of many of the rooms and running physical cables to the closest switches. It would have been nice to just have a 24 port switch and run cables all the way to that switch but that was not to be. Anyhoo, I was wondering what the heck the C2Db3 actually means in terms of what my laptop thinks it is doing / connecting to with it's wired NIC. -- John W. Colby Colby Consulting Reality is what refuses to go away when you do not believe in it