Adding a switch to grow a Linksys Router/Switch based network

[hedgert]

I have a Linksys WRT54GS wireless access point router with 4 port switch. It's connected to a cable modem and this configuration works well.

I want to extend the network and so I've bought a 5 port wired switch. I connect the switch into one of the 4 ports on the WRT54GS and connect a PC to the switch. I get a network connection and an ip address, but that's about it. I obviously need to do some config, but don't know what to do.

My original network (based on the router) assigns IPs in the range 192.168.1.100. The switch assigns IPs from 192.168.3.0.

When I run ipconfig on a PC on the new network I see the IP address and the subnet mask, but I notice that no default gateway is set - so presumably any traffic for nodes outside the network run by the switch isn't routed anywhere.

My question is, what do I have to do to configure the new bit of network to work with the existing one? Is there some way to set the default gateway? Do I need to do more? Will I need to fiddle with the default firewall settings on the WRT54GS? I've looked at the firewall config in the WRT54GS and I can't see anything that looks like it would restrict traffic to the local 192.168.1 segment - but I'm on shaky ground here - I don't know enough about networks!

Can anyone help?

Thanks
Tim

 

[bcastner]

I have no idea where 192.168.3.0 is coming from. If this is a switch, and connected between a LAN port on the Linksys and the uplink port on the switch, nothing else needs to be done.

The client workstations are set to obtain IP address automaticly, and will be serviced by the DHCP server of the Linksys.

Make sure you have not enabled MAC filtering on the Linksys.

 

[spook007]

Do you have any other pc connected on the network that might be wanting to act as the DHCP server? It is pretty odd that you're getting an ip address in a totally new subnet. Make sure you've got your switch hooked up just like bcastner described.

on the PC that is giving you the ip address of 192.168.3.0 go to the command prompt and type in "ipconfig /all" without the quotes and post your results. We'd be able to help you out with more info.

 

[hedgert]

Thank you both for your quick replies.

Having gained confidence that the configuration I had should work, I probed a bit and found that the LAN connection's TCP/IP properties didn't have "Obtain IP address automatically" switched on. Having tweaked this and "Obtain DNS server address automatically" all worked fine. I usually use this Laptop on a wireless network and don't use the wired LAN connection often (although oddly I have used it before, so not sure how it ended up in that manual state).

Thanks for your help. Problem solved.