Help designing network.

Sorry about the bad grammar and bad drawing. But think I've just got a fever walking under the rain this morning, not feeling so well.

1. I'm trying to link these 4 separate network together A-B-C-D.
2. A B and D both have its own internet.
3. C uses internet connection sharing from B.
4. D is a private network not linked yet
5. They are all Windows xp pro machine including the main PC which links them.
6. PC is mainly connected to B as it's only got 1 wifi card enabled. Seems like if I enable both wifi internet on C dies. (I think its to do with the routing)
7. I'm going to link network D to PC as wired and not wireless.

I want to keep them all in different subnet (if that is the correct term). C will only be using B internet. I want the four network to be able to access each other (file share) also maybe plan lan games (but not high priorty). Currently only PC have the ability to access A B and C files. Since its acting as a router.

I have tried using windows to bridge the network, but it does not work. When I bridge A B and C the wireless connection to A and B on PC will disconnect leaving only C connected. Maybe again its got to do with windows routing?

So I'm a bit stuck and I don't know what to do. Is it to do with windows routing? Or should I install ubuntu or some other distribution? As I have heard linux is much better for networking. Only problem is I'm not that great at linux. I have a laptop with ubuntu on but setting it up as a dhcp pxe server took me like the whole day.

So can someone give me a hand on linking these 4 different network?

Thanks,
BaNZ

 

Have you tried manually setting the routing on all of the machines connected? If not, check the routing tables on each of the machines, the main PC especially, to make sure the entries are correct from source to destination. Take care to make these routes persistent. Use the route/? command if you haven't already in case something is unclear. I don't know if XP will handle multiple wireless adapters by default. Hmmm that's about all I can think of right now, heat up some chicken soup & hope you feel better soon.

 

I have never used windows routing before, guess I better google and do a bit of reading. I have always thought window does it automatically. I have bridge 2 network before, both LAN they work fine.

I thought I need to do more work to get them to ping each other. Setup a server, network bridge etc?

Eg 192.168.1.2 wants to ping 192.168.10.2 (different subnet) As at the moment there is no way of me pinging a different subnet. So I don't know what I need to do.

I'll lookup on windows routing now.

Edit: Thanks for the advice on chicken soup But too bad I'm at work. Feeling a bit better now as it is not raining and sunny heh.

 

No need for routing. Use a class B subnet mask i.e. 255.255.0.0
Follow this guide if you want a more refined class B subnet mask:
http://www.swcp.com/~jgentry/topo/unit3.htm

 

The ideal class B subnet mask for your network configuration would be 255.255.240.0 which would allow 192.168.10.2 to communicate to host 192.168.1.2 assuming you are using only 2 subnets

 

I had a look on the guide you have provided but it is a bit too difficult to understand especially all the terms they use. Will need to do a bit more reading on tcp/ip.
Hmm so the easy way is to change the dhcp server on each router to give subnet of 255.255.240.0 ? I have 4 different subnets

192.168.1.1 x2 (will need to change it to something else once I link the private network)
192.168.10.1
192.168.5.1

Each of them have their own internet access, which I thought if they are in the same subnet they would not work.

So correct me if I'm wrong, 255.255.240.0 would allow 192.168.0.1 communicate up to 192.168.10.255?

BENDER, mind if I ask you the difference between routing and changing the subnet in my case? Will I compromise the security?

Edit: Actually after putting some thought into it, I only want two subnet to communicate with each other. eg 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.5.1. In this case I should use routing instead?

 

Yes.
The calculation is simple:

You can use routing in your scenario, but this involves the tedious task of setting up the routing table ><; Routing is best used when you need to connect two totally different ips, i.e. 202.125.1.1 <-> 192.168.1.1 or 10.1.1.1 <-> 192.168.1.1

Since all of your computers are using the private ip 192.168.*.*, subnetting would simplify your task (well theoretically). AFAIK, there won't be any security compromise with subnetting since it only affects your internal network. The main advantage of subnetting over routing is speed In the case of routing, each packet would need to consult the routing table to determine its destination.

I do believe subnetting would work in your scenario. Try it and please correct me if i was wrong...

Here's a great article on subnetting
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-1035-6089187.html

 

Very nice guide, much easier to understand than the previous one. Seems like I understand how IP work much more now. I'll give it a try changing subnet when I get home. Don't want to risk doing it remotely or else I might not be able to remote to my pc at home

 

Then subnet mask 255.255.248.0 would suffice
Let me know if subnetting works for you. Also what do you mean by "each of them have their own internet access"? Do you have separate access for each pc? Why?

 

This shows that 255.255.248.0 would allow access up to 10.0.8.0. Would this mean I would only need to set it to 255.255.250.0 to get it work up to 192.168.5.1? Since 255.255.248.0 brings it up to 192.168.8.0 ?


"each of them have their own internet access"?

We started with four separate network, we have 4 floors. Each floor have its own internet connection with different isp and it's own network (thats why the different subnet). We just want to connect all four network together. But since each of the router have different ports opened / routed. We do not want all computers to be on the same subnet eg 192.168.1.1 (most common).

I only maintain the PC on 2 of the floors, therefore I want to be able to remote control them and file share. But we need all network to be connected as some students want to play lan games.

Our network isn't big, only about 4-5 students live in each floor. But they have mac, windows, linux and xbox.

 

255.255.250.0 is not a valid subnet mask unfortunately. Only those that you see on the picture are valid (binary logic)

Would it not be easier to have only one ISP and one subnet? The main reason of using different subnets is when you have more hosts than one subnet can contain.

 

Ah I see, have to calculate in binary.

We had only 1 ISP and 1 subnet to start in the beginning. But when your ISP is only 2meg line shared with 100+ people= slower than 56k modem. Then they put a firewall on and blocked most ports but allowed 80 / 8080. So we all started complaining (students). The manager basically said go ahead and install your own internet if you want.

Now we got 4 floors with 4 different ISP. If I say okay lets all move to one subnet. We will have to reconfigure all routers and their port forwarding. Might even have to reconfigure each PC. We don't want to share internet access with each floor, this is because when your playing a fps game when someone uploading pictures to their myspace its pretty annoying.

But I figure that if I use windows routing it wouldn't be that difficult, since I can just write a small batch file and ask everyone to update their routing table.

Since you have provided a better solution - changing subnet mask. This would be easy as I would just need to login each router and change the subnet mask.

One of the other reasons is I like learning new things, if I can set this up it would be great. In the past I have always setup network that has only got 1 subnet. You can't really say its setting up network. With windows its just plugging everything into the router.

 

It should work theoretically, but never does in real life

What i would have done is setup a unix gateway, connect the 4 isps to the gateway and get all pcs to connect to internet thru the gateway. That way the internet load would be distributed over the 4 isps and everybody would benefit

Since the network has already been set up, just change the subnet to see what it gives.

 

I'll definitely let you know if it works

Hmm unix gateway, that sounds very very interesting. Never knew you could balance load the internet! So..... which OS can do something like that? I've only used SuSE and ubuntu before. It will be my next project In total we have at least 11+ ISP in my block.

Yes the network has already been there for quite sometime, and most people have their designated ip + ports forwarded.

 

I would not recommend windows routing on individual PCs/Laptops mainly because this will work only in this network environment. Any changes to the network would require reconfiguring the ip routing tables. Also, the windows routing info would need to be removed from the routing table if one needs to use his PC outside this network config, say at home.

Load balancing sounds easy, but is in fact very challenging to implement Fortunately there exist commercial products such as ClarkConnect Office/Enterprise which would do just that. The free alternative would be setting ubuntu or slackware and meddle with the ip tables... sth i would not recommend x_x

http://www.clarkconnect.com/info/compare.php
http://www.clarkconnect.com/wiki/index.php?title=Network_Settings_-_Multi-WAN

ClarkConnect is a nice product, has a lot of features (Load balancing, fail over, Bandwidth shaping, web filtering and many more) and is worth every penny.

Also read this white paper concerning load balancing over multiple networks
http://www.f5.com/solutions/technology/pdfs/multihome_wp.pdf

 

Wow, very thorough guide Bender, great job! Tell us how it turns out BaNZ!

 

Hmm I heard about clarkconnect 5 years ago, back then it was free and I still got the CD! I'm going to play around with my current network for a bit and see if I can get it to work. Once I get it to work I'll try clarkconnect

Off to try the subnet change now, will let you guys know if succesful or not

Edit: Hit some brick walls, 1. I couldn't get the 3rd network connected to the server.

Currently this is the network ip's on my server:
192.168.0.108 (wireless DHCP) Network B
192.168.1.5 (Static IP which I have set) Network C
Both network are able to communicate with each other.

I put in another NIC and link it to the wired router 192.168.1.1 (Network D) with DHCP on. But I'm unable to get an IP! I can set it to 192.168.1.5 but it does not ping 192.168.1.1 and vice versa. There is no packet received at all. Might be a faulty NIC so I'll bring my laptop home tomorrow to check.

2nd brick wall: I'm unable to change the subnet on my router! lol it only allows me to change 255.255.255.x. Tough luck

I'm way too tired today, and my brains aren't working. I have checked the routing and at this time of the day I can't understand it. I'll check the routing thoroughly tomorrow.

 

CC is still free, well the community edition anyway. But if you want the "enterprise" features like load balancing, then you need to cough $$

For the NIC that can't ping the router, check the cable wiring.

Oh well. Too bad for subnetting

It's bad network design to have more subnets than you need. Perhaps you should consider the unix gateway and single subnet alternative.

 

You could always go the routing table route if all else fails, probably slower and less flexible like Bender said but it usually works (and is pretty easy to implement)

 

Hey how about the other routers? Can you change subnets on them?

 

Why don't you connect them all to a SMB class router or managed switch so you can setup virtual lans for isolation. It is a lot easier than what your are doing. My router supports 10 virtual lans.

 

Unix gateway (too complicated for the time being) I'll need to understand how routing works first. Single subnet- I think its not possible due to the fact that we have 4 isp.

At the moment I have the server connected to network 192.168.0.* and 192.168.5.* The .5 network doesn't have internet so it is ICS with .0 one. This is done easily by XP just need to set ICS on. I do not have to configure anything and windows route the traffic correctly.

I'll post the route table here on my server:

route print 192.168.0.*

Network Destination Netmask Gateway Interface Metric
192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.108 192.168.0.108 25
192.168.0.108 255.255.255.255 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 25
192.168.0.255 255.255.255.255 192.168.0.108 192.168.0.108 25
Default Gateway: 192.168.0.1
___________________________________________________

route print 192.168.5.*

Network Destination Netmask Gateway Interface Metric
192.168.5.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.5.1 192.168.5.1 20
192.168.5.1 255.255.255.255 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 20
192.168.5.255 255.255.255.255 192.168.5.1 192.168.5.1 20
Default Gateway: 192.168.0.1

I can understand this as from the guide BENDER provide earlier .0 and .255 is reserved for broadcast and other purposes.

The 192.168.5.1 and 192.168.0.108 is pointed to 127.0.0.1 as this is the IP for the server itself.

Now route print 255.*

255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 192.168.0.108 192.168.0.108 1
255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 192.168.0.108 90006 1
255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 192.168.5.1 192.168.5.1 1

I haven't got a clue why is there a need to include this in windows routing.

Large chunk removed as I think I was wrong.

edit: Wow it sure looks like a mess. sorry for the long and messy post. I have tried my best to make sure its readable.

Another question is that I'll only need to set the static routing in the server + the 4 routers right? Or it will be a very tedius task to set it in each computer!

 

Yes I can but at the moment those two network can communicate with each other even when the subnets are not change. So I can't really test it lol!

We have got 4 isp and they have a different router. Some of the router eg BT is locked to their specific ISP only. In addition we are a bunch of students and no one has the money. I'm working now but still I cant afford to pay.

I'm going to have to go home today and test my NIC card, as yesterday I had a slight problem that it was not picking up the cable so I had to clean the pins and it worked.

 

I've got 3 of the subnets connected Only one left that I can't do. I'll give more details later.


I have found out you need to edit in the registry to enabled IPenabledRouter on the server. The server is connected to 3 routers and 1 AP. I have set the correct static routing on each of the routers. The only problem now lies with the pcs behind the AP, they are unable to access other subnet. This could be because its not a router, but I think with the correct routing on the server it should sort the problem out.

 

Found an interesting FreeBSD. It's only 30mb!

If anyone is interested in Multi-Wan/Load Balancing.

http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi-Wan/Load-Balancing

Going to give this a try when I've got the time. Seems pretty simple

 

Cool mate
Happy tinkering