The following is long and very non-Thinkpad-specific, so I apologize (on behalf of Andrew:-)
>I think there might be something up with the router, or with my >install of DD-WRT. I chose DD-WRT over Tomato just because the latter >seems to have limited documentation, and the former seemed easier. There shouldn't be much performance difference between DD-WRT and Tomato, but I can say that my E2000 is extremely stable under the Tomato install I'm using (from http://tomato.groov.pl/) and the user interface is relatively very simple. If you decide to reinstall DD-WRT or switch to Tomata don't forget to erase your nvram. If you didn't do that the first time that could be the cause of phantom connections. > To your other suggestions, unfortunately I can't really reconfigure the > Bell gateway since if I'm not here and Bell needs to troubleshoot, It should only be a single setting on the Bell modem/router, and should be permitted by your provider (otherwise you can't do any port passthroughs to your local machines, which is severe network crippling). However, you should be able to do what you want regardless. I'm not an expert on networks by any means, but let me try to explain what you want your network to look like to the best of my expertise. At the point where the cable or dsl enters your house you have a modem A, which might or might not also serve as a router B (it does in your case) and a wireless access point C. (In other words, you have a single device acting as ABC, but for the sake of this discussion let's treat them as different devices. ) Modem A serves up an IP connection with a non-local IP address assigned at your ISP. Router B creates a subnet with local addresses 192.168.2.*, acts as a NAT firewall, and assigns addresses in this subnet both to devices connected to some ethernet ports and to device C. Device C permits wireless devices also to attach to router B and also get assigned addresses on 192.168.2.* Now, if you attach the E2000 (call it D) in standard (router) mode to one of the ethernet ports, it will act in addition as a NAT firewall to any wired or wireless devices attached to D, and assign some subnet; by default this is 192.168.1.*, but you have changed it to 192.168.2.*. In router mode this would be very confusing, since B and D are now controlling distinct networks with overlapping name space; what happens is anything attached to B or C (this includes D) gets an IP address, and then D might also try to assign the same addresses. There are three ways to eliminate this confusion: One is to keep D in router mode and let it assign a distinct network, for example 192.168.1.*. A possible problem with this is that devices on 192.168.2.* can't address individual devices within 192.168.1.* by address (since everything on D looks to the outside world like they have D's IP address), only through port forwarding in your router. Likewise, while the devices on D can see the ones in B/C, some networking protocols might not believe they are all on the same network, you might have to fiddle with subnet masks for some applications. Alternately, you can designate D an access point. In this case it does no routing, and all IP addresses are assigned by B, regardless of whether the device is attached to B, C, or D. I *think* this is what you wanted to do. The downside is that all the nice routing power of D is ignored. Finally, you can designate D as a bridge. You don't want to do that, since this will be a bridge to nowhere. A bridge is a dumb device that passes IP through to a computer or router. If D is a bridge and you attach a device (say a thinkpad) to it, then that thinkpad will be on the net with the same IP that B gave to D. If you also attach some other device (say a VoIP phone) to D, then this phone will have the *same IP address*. So you now have 3 devices with the same IP address and no resolution. This is bad. On the other hand, if you make B a bridge, disable C, attach D and only D to an ethernet port on B and configure D as a router, then there will be no confusion, D will do all the routing and NAT translation (which is good, the E2000 under DD-WRT or Tomato is good at that), and everything will coexist nicely. Alternately - if you really can't make B a bridge - then you could still do the rest of what I describe, being careful to make D's subnet assignment something different from C's, and everything will still work Ok as long as you don't attach anything other than D to B/C. The question I haven't resolved is whether you absolutely have to have your other provider-supplied devices (like your DVR) attached to ISP-provided device B on that particular (192.168.2.*) network. My guess is a strong "no", but if I am wrong then you have complications. > I'm open to setting up a repeater but I thought that meant a cabled > connection from gateway to remote router, which I can't do. No, a repeater is standalone, it just receives then retransmits the wireless signal, boosting it. _______________________________________________ Thinkpad mailing list [email protected] http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad
