How do you connecting a LAN to the Internet? 1

[user127]

Hi All,

Possibly a dumb question but here goes:
How would you go about connecting a fixed IP network (operating through two linked switches - gigabit/T + 10/100 Ethernet) to the internet - as broadband has just become available in the area.

Up to now a single host has been used as the communications machine with ISDN narrowband dialup to the internet. My thinking is that it would make more sense to allow all the hosts (approx 16) to access the internet through a common gateway - the broadband router connecting to one of the existing two switches. Because the two switches are already connected to eachother, the single WAN port on the gig switch is already taken - any advice on how best to connect the broadband router up to this network (and configure the hosts to find their way to the internet for that matter). The hosts are a mainly Macs (OSX), with a few PCs and a Sun system using Solaris.


I appreciate the answer is probably obvious, but I'm not too hot on network architecture

Thanks for your help in advance!
(This is my first post so be gentle with me

 

[user127]

PS - sorry about to dodgy thread title, it should have read "How do you go about connecting a LAN to the internet

 

[pansophic]

You need to change your default gateway on all of the machines to be your broadband router's IP address. This is probably a good time to consider upgrading to DHCP, so that you never have to go through the headache of visiting each computer each time you make a substantial network reconfiguration, or add a new capability.

Your broadband router will provide a DHCP server that is functional, and some even allow you to set static DHCP addresses for devices like servers and printers.

You can run DHCP and static IP addresses on the same network, so there is no requirement to make all of the changes simultaneously. But since you are going to visit each of the machines individually, you may as well change them to DHCP when you visit them.

You can upgrade relatively easily just by changing the default gateway of the computer that has does the ISDN dial-up now. It will increase your internal network traffic by quite a bit (each packet bound for the Internet will be sent to that computer, then resent to the broadband router) but it will allow you to upgrade slowly.


pansophic

 

[user127]

Thanks Panasonic,

A succinct and meaningful answer.

I've followed your advice - BT have got us a Cisco 830 router which has an ADSL port - the other two routers are now connected to this and the gateway has been set on all the hosts (static at present as the BT guy did it).

Thanks for you help.

PixelSmith