Need help with routing my home network

Fahrvergnuugen

Fahrvergnuugen

I am the law!
Here is a diagram of my home network:
housenetwork.png


Right now if computer A tries to send a file to computer C, it travels at 40k/s because it gets routed back out to the internet and my ISP limits my outgoing bandwidth to 40k/s.

Computers A and B are mine. The rest are my house mate's. Both machine A and machine C run Apache and FTP servers (as well as SSH & AFP). Because of this, I bought a second IP address from my ISP since both my roommate and I need the same ports.

As you can see, all of the computers are connected to each other on 100base hardware, so what I'm wondering is... is there a way to either A reconfigure the structure of my network or B force the machines to communicate with each other directly rather than traveling back out to the internet?
 
If you could hardcode the IP-ARP tables in your two upstream-most routers, that would enable you to communicate directly between your two networks going just across the hub and not upstream. To keep crap off the upstream network I would recommend a switch in place of that hub. They're cheap enough.

Another option is to have a higher end router that can deal with multiple IP addresses and distribute mulitple NAT's downstream over multiple ports. They wouldn't be identical NAT's, you'd need mutually exclusive IP's for each guy, like 10.1.x x for one guy and 10.2.x.x for the other. 192.168 would be just as good, but then you'd be limited to smaller subdomains. I have my doubts that either of you need more than 254 IPs though.

My cable company's upstream hardware was programmed to respond to ALL ARP queries as needing to go upstream, so the only way I could do what you are talking about was to hardcode ARP tables both ways. I was using one naked box running OS Xv1.0 and one IPNetRouter box running OS 9. Both of which have way more flexibility than any consumer level router boxes I've seen, so good luck with your current hardware. It may not want to do what you want it to.

I will continue to recommend IPNetRouter on OS 9 to anyone who wants a cheap router and does stuff with Macs. It's awesome. It taught me sooooo much, and it's stable, and fast, and makes good use of old hardware. If it won't run X, it's only good as a router anymore anyway, right? 100MHz should be plenty.
 
You need multiple nics in your mac though, right?

I've been told by two different people that if I connect one router's uplink port to a regular port on the other router, and then change the IPs of the computers on one of the routers that it will work.

router A would use 192.168.2.xxx and the other one would use 192.168.1.xxx
subnet would be 255.255.0.0 (i think)
 
nope, I don't understand that logic.

the only way what you say makes sense is if "uplink port" means "using or emulating a crossover cable." The two upstream most routers should both talk to the cable modem with their upstream ports. If you connect the two downstream sides of the routers together with a crossover cable, then appletalk should work for everyone at full speed. The IP addressing might be all sorts of screwed up. I think that both routers would attempt to issue DHCP services to all clients. Good luck with DHCP in that scenario. If you're willing to code your own addresses then you might be in luck with the bridged routers scenario that I think we're talking about.

You could keep one set of addresses 192.168.1.x and the other as 192.168.2.x and one set uplinks through one router, and the other set through it's own router, but on all of the machine set the subnet mask to be 255.255.0.0 so that all of 192.168 is the broadcast domain and all machines will resolve locally instead of trying to go through the uplink (gateway.)

The routers should probably still be told that they are using a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 as that's what they'd expect. Now a sensible peice of concumer equipment would never give you DHCP options for this, so you'd be hard coding at least half, probably all of the machines that you want to be able to talk to machines on the other local set. With 192.168.x.x. addresses behind a NAT router, you'll either be communicating at full speed or not at all.

I've never seen a router with an uplink port. Switches and hubs yes, but not routers. The term uplink on these devices is a bastardized marketing term anyway, they usually just mean that it's a crossover port (usually yoked to another port) so that you don't have to own a crossover cable to bridge multiple switches or hubs together. Up and down are loose terms on switches as the entire network is flat for them anyway. On real equipment the uplink port will be capable of much greater speed than the other ports, and it makes sense to use this as your uplink port for bandwidth but it doesn't change the flatness of normal network topology.

I'm babbling now ... time to go look at the new Apple goodies.
 
you are correct. on these routers the uplink port is just a crossover port and it is married to the last downstream port. so if you use the uplink port, you cant use port 4.
 
OK. I think we're talking the same language then. I think I've said all that I can say, and you probably have an idea of where you're going with this, so good luck. I probably could have said things more clearly if I'd using a little OmniGraffle to counter your diagramming skillz ... but alas, I was overtaken by raging apathy.

Best of luck with your routing conundrum. And this crazy thread will be left to linger for all to puzzle upon for months to come.

mmmmm ... apathy.
 
I knew my job title as Network Engineer for a large telco would come in handy some day.

I didn't read all responses above, so if I duplicate excuse me.

Here is what I would do, using your existing hardware. Unless you need to physically be seperated from your roommate, network wise... do this...

The ports on your LinkSys router acts as a switch, in other words, a hub that limits collissions. Assign the IP ranges on each side of the LinkSys router to the same, 192.168.0.x or whatever. Take a cross-over cable and connect the two linksys routers together on the LAN side, and hook your hub up as well.

This will create a local broadcast domain on the 192.168.0.x network. Make sure you assign one of your LinkSys routers local IP to something different than the default, like .254. This way, you would have a 192.168.0.254 and a 192.168.0.1, each acting as gateways to the rest of the Internet.

When computers A-E want to talk to each other, they are all on the local network, the local subnet... they will never go through the gateway, or the LinkSys router. When each wanted to go out to the Internet, they would transverse their own Linksys router. Example, A&B would have a default gateway of 192.168.0.1, and CDE would have a default gateway of 192.168.0.254.

You would each maintain your own unique public IPs and still be able to do port translation of incoming traffic to your seperate boxes.

All of this for the cost of a cross-over cable, or if your ports will auto cross-over, then another ethernet cable will do fine.

I am not sure what type of port situation that will leave you with, you might need another hub or replace the 4 with an 8 port. It wouldn't matter which linksys or hub any of the computers were plugged into, they would still use their own assigned default gateway.
 
I've had a similar setup before at home, with two seperate Internet providers. One being a cable modem, the other being DSL. I would have gateway routers (linksys for example), one feeding to each of the services. All my internal computers would be setup on the same network, 192.168.0.x 255.255.255.0, and my gateway for my cable modem would be .1 and my gateway for my DLS would be .2. If at any time I wanted to switch to a different provider, from my current default, I'd just change gateway addresses and instantly that machine was using the other provider.
 
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