How to setup network

[derekn]

I have been given the assignment of setting up our churches network. Some goofballs were assigned the task of getting the equipment and I have to deal with making it all work together. Here is what we have:

A HP 24 port 1Gbit switch

A dsl router/modem with business DSL

A server that will run our mail and webserver

5 other standard PCs that will be networked.

Now, if I had my way we would have bought a regular router, and connected the DSL modem to the WAN port, so on and so forth.

My question is how do i go about (WITHOUT USING ICS) making sure all computers have internet connectivity, and are all networked together with this given equipment?

Thanks much in advance for your help, anyone.

Derek

[DMR]

Without a router or ICS? No can do, unless your ISP can give you (and you can afford) an account where you can have separate, public IP addresses for every computer on the LAN. Even if that's an option, I doubt that you want all of those machines sitting right out there on the Net, directly accessible to every J. Random Hacker on the planet. Obviously, that is exactly what you would have with the "solution" you're asking about.

Do the Right Thing- buy the broadband router and install it between the modem and the switch. The cost of such a router is about equal to the cost of one of the many hours of time you'll spend rebuiding your entire network after it gets hacked.

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[extofer]

the dsl modem is probably assigned an IP by default, 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1... I would try to connect it to the switch, then connect the other nodes and use static IP addressing, with the DSL modem IP as the gateway and Prefered DNS Server.

[extofer]

OR... if money is a problem, return the switch and get a router/switch.

[derekn]

I really appreciate your input. I talked with another friend of mine offline and he said the same thing. I will try it, and if all else fails, we will just buy a router.

Derek

[DMR]

I would try to connect it to the switch, then connect the other nodes and use static IP addressing, with the DSL modem IP as the gateway and Prefered DNS Server.

I doubt that will work. A DSL modem only hands out 1 IP address to the "LAN", and a switch doesn't perform NAT, so only the first machine to obtain a DHCP lease will be allowed to connect.

[extofer]

even if you go with static IP addressing??
Or, what kind of DSL modem is it... I'm saying this because I have a DSL business account and the DSL modem provided an IP address (for the internal network) and you could configure DCHP or Static IP then go into the switch....

[DMR]

even if you go with static IP addressing??

Static or dynamic IPs; doesn't matter. The thing to understand here is that simple switches are Layer 2 (Data Link Layer) networking devices, and layer 2 devices are only "aware" of hardware (MAC) addresses; they have no knowledge of (or ability to deal with) IP addresses, because IP addresses are a logical component of the network model.

The basic upshot is this:
* Switches cannot be assigned an IP address.
* Switches do not route network traffic according to IP addresses; they connect source and destination computers by MAC addresses only.
* Switches are unaware of the specific function of any device attached to any of their ports. To a switch, any and all connected devices are just NICs with their own unique MAC address, nothing more.
* Switches do not have WAN/Internet/Gateway/etc. subsections built in to them; to a switch, everything connected to its portds is all on the same big (or small) happy LAN.

Given that, what would the switch be able to do with the IP address that the modem would be trying to hand out? Nothing.
If all of the computers on the LAN were already assigned static IPs, I guess you could say that the switch would only do "more nothing", because the IP addressing attempts from/by the modem would not find any computers on LAN which were able to accept the address info.

Be aware though, that some Internet accounts (usually business accounts) will include multiple, Internet-legal (public) IP addresses, and in that case you could have as many computers connecting to the modem as your account had IP addresses. However, this is (almost?) never the case with basic/residential DSL service.