Question re:small office network

[shinobiwest]

Relative's starting a small/home office with her housemates but knows nothing about networking and I've only set up simple residential "civilian" applications. I believe they'd like to avoid getting multiple IPs, which tells me there's a router involved somewhere.

The plan is to run cable underneath in the crawl-space and have jacks in various rooms of the house. She tells me there's a closet that's roughly in the center of the house and they want to relocate a phone/cable jack there, along with the networking equipment. They're concerned about putting multiple jacks in each room (I believe they have 6 rooms to wire).

Questions:
Is it a no-no to plug, say
modem <-> 4 port wireless router <-> 16 port switch ?
Something tells me the poor router in the middle might possibly be overwhelmed trying to pipe everything through one cable.

Are switches "grouped" into sets as they appear to be physically? That is, could I plug router1 into switch1 (for switch2-4), router2 into switch5 (6-8), etc? Does this have any benefit over the above setup?

Thanks in advance,
-s

[chuckles]

Relative's starting a small/home office with her housemates but knows nothing about networking and I've only set up simple residential "civilian" applications. I believe they'd like to avoid getting multiple IPs, which tells me there's a router involved somewhere.

The plan is to run cable underneath in the crawl-space and have jacks in various rooms of the house. She tells me there's a closet that's roughly in the center of the house and they want to relocate a phone/cable jack there, along with the networking equipment. They're concerned about putting multiple jacks in each room (I believe they have 6 rooms to wire).

Questions:
Is it a no-no to plug, say
modem <-> 4 port wireless router <-> 16 port switch ?
Something tells me the poor router in the middle might possibly be overwhelmed trying to pipe everything through one cable.

Are switches "grouped" into sets as they appear to be physically? That is, could I plug router1 into switch1 (for switch2-4), router2 into switch5 (6-8), etc? Does this have any benefit over the above setup?

Thanks in advance,
-s

What kind of business? If there isn't a need to move a lot of data around between the computers, they can easily go with a wireless solution and not have to worry about the wiring bit. :)

-chuckles-

[Black_Magic]

Questions:
Is it a no-no to plug, say
modem <-> 4 port wireless router <-> 16 port switch ?
Something tells me the poor router in the middle might possibly be overwhelmed trying to pipe everything through one cable.

routers are beasts, they route traffic really well, hence the term router.


Are switches "grouped" into sets as they appear to be physically? That is, could I plug router1 into switch1 (for switch2-4), router2 into switch5 (6-8), etc? Does this have any benefit over the above setup?

Thanks in advance,
-s
I'm not completely sure what you are saying here, but I'm pretty sure the answer here is no, like if a switch has ports 1-5, then a space, and ports 6-10 it doesn't make a different, however, you can set up VLANs. Which would probably solve any problems you have with the router being overwhelmed.


FYI, I do have a CCNA certification, but I don't actually have any real world experience, so what I'm spouting could be complete BS.

[tokenuser]

What kind of business? If there isn't a need to move a lot of data around between the computers, they can easily go with a wireless solution and not have to worry about the wiring bit. :)

-chuckles-Wireless is OK with one or two machines, but for a small business you really need to go for a switch. 100/1000Mbps point to point is better than 14-54Mbps broadcasting on an increasing congesting 2.4GHz spectrum.

Pulling cable through a crawl space is easy ... especially since you can now get the supplies for it at your local Home Depot. Even in our house, I pulled cable rather than relying on Wifi to reach everywhere in the house.

Going Cable Modem -> Wireless Router -> Switch is a doable option. You will have an IP address assigned by the service provider that sits on one side of your router (e.g. 68.123.213.45), but then you set up your routers LAN address range to be a non routable IP range (198.x.x.x is common, I use 172.16.10.x because it doesn't interfer with the VPN connections I have with work that use a 198.x.x.x address space). The router is then set up to either hand out IP addresses via DHCP, or you could hard code them on a per PC basis.

I would also recommend the use of something like the D-Link DP-301+ Print Server (or similar) to share printers between the users without the need to have a PC dedicated to being a print server.

I'm not completely sure what you are saying here, but I'm pretty sure the answer here is no, like if a switch has ports 1-5, then a space, and ports 6-10 it doesn't make a different, however, you can set up VLANs. Which would probably solve any problems you have with the router being overwhelmed.

Ports 1-16 on a switch are all the same. The groups of 4 are just an artifact of the way the switch was manufactured, and has no bearing oin it functionality. VLANs (Virtual LANS) can be set up via switch configuration, or by netmasking the IP addresses on the PCs ... but I wouldn't even go there as it is over complicating the situation.

You are right that the Router is a beast. It is designed to ... well ... route (packets). On the back of the switch (or maybe to the side) there will be a port that is labelled either as WAN, or Uplink (more common) ... one of the ethernet ports from the router will plug into that port on the switch. This is often termed cascading.

FYI, I do have a CCNA certification, but I don't actually have any real world experience, so what I'm spouting could be complete BS.

... and THAT is why certifications are now virtually useless in the industry.