Small office network problems

[DestinyKnight]

Hi Guys, hopefully someone here can help me out.

We've recently epanded our offices at work and we just finished connecting the new offices to the network.We've finished moving employees into the new office, and connecting their computers to the NetGear router/switch we've used to expand our office network. The computers can connect to the internet, but they cannot see any shared resources that are not connected to this new router/switch

I suck at the explanations, so here's a picure:

http://img141.imageshack.us/my.php?image=network4tl.gif]

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Computers 5 and 6 cannot access shared resources like the server, mulitfunction printer, etc, and computers 1,2,3,4 cannot access the shared drive on computer 5.

The problem must be with the NetGrear router/switch connected to th intel hub. The router is preventing networked computers from accessing resources "outside" of it's sub-network. Is there a setting on this router that I need to turn off/on? Do we need to use some other device? perhaps a bridge or stand-alone switch?

 

[Pheran]

Why in the world did you put the new clients behind a router? What you really want is a simple switch. If you really want to, you can use the router as a switch by plugging the Intel hub into the LAN side (don't use the WAN port at all), but if you do this make sure that DHCP is disabled on the router or it will probably wreak havoc with any existing DHCP server that's on your network.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: Pheran
Why in the world did you put the new clients behind a router? What you really want is a simple switch. If you really want to, you can use the router as a switch by plugging the Intel hub into the LAN side (don't use the WAN port at all), but if you do this make sure that DHCP is disabled on the router or it will probably wreak havoc with any existing DHCP server that's on your network.

Bingo.

You only use a router if you need to create a separate IP network. You don't need that. Just use a switch.

Otherwise you will run into what you are seeing. You need to do a whole lot more work to get name resolution/sharing working (and you can still do that), but it'd just be easier to do the network properly and use a switch.

 

[DestinyKnight]

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: Pheran
Why in the world did you put the new clients behind a router? What you really want is a simple switch. If you really want to, you can use the router as a switch by plugging the Intel hub into the LAN side (don't use the WAN port at all), but if you do this make sure that DHCP is disabled on the router or it will probably wreak havoc with any existing DHCP server that's on your network.

Bingo.

You only use a router if you need to create a separate IP network. You don't need that. Just use a switch.

Otherwise you will run into what you are seeing. You need to do a whole lot more work to get name resolution/sharing working (and you can still do that), but it'd just be easier to do the network properly and use a switch.

We used the Router because it's all we had laying around at the time. We just wanted to use the switch part of it, but can't figure out how to turn of the Router functions. It sounds like we just need to invest in the proper equipment.

If I need to, is there a website someone can directe me to that can help me figure out how to get the name resolution/sharing working?

 

[DestinyKnight]

Well, we picked up an 8 port switch and replaced the netgear router with it. the PC's connected to this switch are still unable to see the other computers and resources on the network. I'm not sure what the problem is now. every computer is set to be on the same workgroup, and they all receive their IP address from the DHCP server on the actionTec router. Computers on the Hub cannot see computers on the switch and vice versa. could this be a limitation of the hub that the switch is connected to?

 

[Pheran]

Originally posted by: DestinyKnight
Well, we picked up an 8 port switch and replaced the netgear router with it. the PC's connected to this switch are still unable to see the other computers and resources on the network. I'm not sure what the problem is now. every computer is set to be on the same workgroup, and they all receive their IP address from the DHCP server on the actionTec router. Computers on the Hub cannot see computers on the switch and vice versa. could this be a limitation of the hub that the switch is connected to?

Hmm, now things are getting weird. The fact that the systems on the switch are getting DHCP addresses from your router means that they do in fact have some connectivity back through the hub. I would start with ping tests... can all systems ping the router? Can systems on the switch ping systems on the hub (make sure you ping by IP, not by name)? Does everyone have Internet connectivity? If all that works, I'd suspect some kind of Windows configuration issue.

 

[Slowlearner]

I am assuming that all the pcs can connect to the internet which means that they have working nics etc.etc. The problem with dynamic DHCP configuration is that the paths are not well laid out - you need to check by going to the run command and typing \\pc5\<insert a shared folder name>. if you have fixed IPs the connections may be easier. A quick fix though is to add Netbuei network protocol to all the pcs - in mixed windows OS network it works like a charm.

Take a look ad JackMDs site http://www.ezlan.net/ for basic config and troubleshooting tips.

 

[Aarondeep]

Try accessing the shares via their IP addresses rather than their windows names so like something that is \\mycomputer\share would be like \\192.168.x.x\share