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12 February 2008

Any home networking experts in the house? I'm usually not too bad at this, but I'm stuck here...→[More:]

Here's the setup I'm trying right now. It's a change from the last config, mainly because the port-forwarding wasn't working as reliably as I'd like for bit torrents.(ok, I'll put it in the first comment, cos the image tag doesn't seem to be available even after the [more inside].)

The problem is, While A & C can see each other, neither can see B, and vice versa. And, because B is the bit torrent client machine, it's rather handy to be able to drop torrent files there, VNC into it and start the downloads. Also, once downloads are complete, it's much nicer to be able to browse to that machine and grab the files.

And...I know traffic is flowing from the wireless, through the VOIP router, and out, because A&C (as well as B) are able to access the internet. For the life of me, though, I can't seem to get the machines talking. I am relatively certain that windows firewall isn't the issue, as all was working fine until I changed B to connect directly to the VOIP router.

Any ideas on how I can build the route I need here?

post by: richat at: 10:19 | 10 comments

Here's a poor drawing of the setup:
≡ Click to see image ≡

posted by richat 12 February | 10:20

really dumb, off the cuff kindegarten level question cos i can't see your diagramme/photo, it's on a blocked image service here @ work, but did sharing somehow get turned off on B?

that's all I got....

posted by lonefrontranger 12 February | 10:32

netmask the same on all three?

posted by trondant 12 February | 10:36

Netmask all three the same? I should share a little more. The VOIP router is in the 192.168.15.X range, while the wireless is 192.168.1.X range.

Did I miss the obvious? Can I just set the Wireless router to do DHCP and hand out 15.X IPs, instead of 1.X?

And, I think sharing's working alright lfr...bummer that photobucket's blocked!

posted by richat 12 February | 10:42

Well, I tried setting the wireless router to 192.168.15.5 and let it hand out IPs....not so worky. I could get an IP eventually, but I couldn't even connect to the router itself. Weird. It's back to 192.168.1.1 for now.

posted by richat 12 February | 11:20

richat did you get it fixed?

dunno if you're on Windoze or something else entirely, but the reason I asked that silly question is that my old WinXP box would occasionally do flaky things like reset sharing to 'none'.

posted by lonefrontranger 12 February | 13:07

Nope, still not working as I hoped it would. I'm home today with a feverish daughter, so after I reset it back to original, I've not had the chance to get back at it. I'll get it right one of these times!

posted by richat 12 February | 13:24

The easy answer is to plug B into your wireless router. Though that may not be possible due to physical separation or whatnot.

The problem with them talking to each other is that your devices are not on the same netmask, and unless your VOIP router is specifically set up to handle this (unlikely), they can't find each other.

The solution is to put everything within the same IP range.

Make sure that your cable modem/router, VOIP router, and wireless router have static IP addresses in the same range (but different from each other). For instance:

Cable modem: 192.168.1.1
VOIP router: 192.168.1.2
Wireless router: 192.168.1.3

Set one router to be the DHCP server with the range set appropriately. For instance, making your VOIP router the DHCP server and the range from 192.168.1.50 - 192.168.1.100.

Make sure your cable modem and wireless router are NOT acting as DHCP servers.

Plug a wireless router SWITCH port into a VOIP router SWITCH port.

Then they should all be able to see each other.

posted by Lafe 12 February | 14:01

Wow, thanks for the detailed instruction Lafe! I am also in the process of building a new PC too, and today, while removing MSN Explorer, I noticed that one of the other networking services was a "RIP Listener" and that tweaked something that I'd seen in the router config. Anyway, I installed the RIP listener, and now, I can access all machines, so long as I do it by IP. I suppose I could put an entry in the local hosts file if I am too lazy to use the IP, but this works for me!

posted by richat 12 February | 19:12

By chance are you using any Microsoft Forefront, Windows Defender type of software?

I've found three PC's lately that, in the Forefront/Defender client, have suddenly shifted the networks from being "trusted" - i.e. private - to "untrusted" - i.e. public.

This makes the public machine invisible to the network.

posted by disclaimer 12 February | 22:30

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