I am a happy EigerStein user + Seawall user. I now have an
increasing "farm" of various boxes behind my firewall/router that
form my Leaf experimental testbed.
Here's what I'm sure is a Newbie question. But alas, my linksys
switch came with zero documentation, and while I'm an
experienced software developer, my only network experience was
getting my LRP box up and running, though that's a darn good
education in itself.
I have a Linksys 10/100 switch. It has 4 ports plus 2 uplink ports.
One of the uplink ports is connected to my LRP box via a
crossover cable, which is in turn connected to the DSL modem. My
other boxes are connected to the regular ports. All is well.
Now I am running out of ports on the Linksys switch due to a spurt
of spending too many hours on Ebay (two Dell boxes and a really
interesting Crystal rack-mount box). Undoubtedly I will buy another
switch with more ports, but in the meantime, I thought, why not
use the other uplink port? So I connected my Dell 166 mhz boxes
(Ebay, $70 heh heh!) to the switch via the uplink port using a
crossover cable. I fired upWin98/IE explorer, and Voila! my box
was on the net.
But even though the Dell box can access the internet through the
uplink port(internet browsing works), the Dell box seemed to be
insulated from the rest of the network for Windows networking - the
uplink port Dell box can't see the others on the network
neighborhood, nor can the other boxes see the uplink box. But
when I connect the "uplink" box to the network via the normal ports
(using a regular cable), everything works.
Questions:
1. What is different about an uplink port and the regular ports on
the switch, other than that the uplink port uses a crossover cable?
(Looks like TCP/IP packets go over the uplink port but not Netbui.)
2. Can I exploit this seeming isolation from Windows networking
caused by the uplink port to use the Dell box connected via the
uplink port as a Web server (e.g. is this a poor man's DMZ?) I'm
pretty sure this is a bad idea and I should get a second network
card for the LRP box and have a really isolated web server on a
DMZ, but I thought I'd ask.
Tim Wegner
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