General Newbie Networking Q's...

[Antoneo]

Hello, I'm relatively new to networking and have a few questions:

1) I have two routers, one wireless and one regular 4 port 10/100 router, what "features" (I'm guessing dhcp?) do I have to turn off on the 10/100 router in order to make it a switch?

2) How easy/painless is it to place a switch behind a router and still allow the computers to access the internet?

3) Is there any security benefit from that configuration:

Internet Connection
| |
Wireless Router --- Laptop
| |
Switch
| |
Computers

Please ignore the laptop for now.

4) How can I tell if my wired network (with the configuration in #3 above) is secure? Is it true that netstat is all I need to check for stray connections?

Thanks in advance, and I'm sorry if the questions are dumb 🙂.

 

[JackMDS]

Answer to Q1 can befound here: How do I use a Wireless Cable/DSL Router as a Switch with an Access Point?

 

[Antoneo]

Well, I haven't really found an answer about the benefits of a switch behind a router setup after searching the forums so...

 

[Lord Evermore]

Bumping for...?

There's about 300 posts a week asking this same type of question. And multiple FAQs about it.