Hi Everyone, I was just wondering if anyone had suggestions on a network that I am going to have to be re-setting up. I haven't done the review yet which I will be doing later today so I don't have the models of any of the equipment. Basically there is two networks in the office. One router does the intranet which includes server and some workstations. The other router has access to the internet which has a few clients connected as well as a wireless access point. The two routers currently are not connected. What they want to happen is have the server have access to the internet to do online backups. They don't want any other machine on that network to have internet access. Another catch is that they want the wireless clients from the other network to be able to connect to the server from the other network. My plan of attack would probably be to have the two networks of course be on a different subnet with both routers connected. Configure the intranet router to use the other router as the gateway. Then have the Server handle the DHCP and have the server as the gateway but not do any dns forwarding. Anyways, this is what I have thought up of solving these issues and I am just wondering if anyone has any suggestions on what else could work or make this setup better. Thanks all for the help!! Jesse

Your plan would open the internet to everyone now connected to the intranet router. I would suggest an additional nic in the server connected to the internet router. Let the router provide the ip to the server nic. This will put the server and wireless stations on the same subnet and provide internet to the server for online backups while still maintaining the intranet security. Do configure the firewall software on the server. It would also be better if the online backup could be port forwarded instead of just a full open pipe to the server. Give a person a fish, they eat for a day. Suggest they internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.

Thanks for the post wanderer. Yea I do think the additional nic method would work a lot nicer. I was almost thinking of juts putting a wireless nic card in the server but was not sure if the throughput through the wireless would be affected and then security reasons as well. Thanks again!

both good reasons not to do wireless to the server. Give a person a fish, they eat for a day. Suggest they internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.

Wanderer, Not being a wise guy, but trying to learn about this combined wireless,wired networking situation. Wouldn't the wireless router being connected to the server which has internet access also give the wireless clients access to the internet? Or am I missing something. I've never run a setup like this so I'm curious as how that would work. Larry Sometimes I think I understand everything, then I regain consciousness

Hi Lary, The wireless clients are allowed to access the internet. They are in a different location of the building. I believe there is even a couple wired clients connected to the router that has internet access. They all have internet access but have never been able to connect to the server.

Group your server / hosts / wirless clients into different subnets, connect both routers together and setup your routing protocol to forward traffic between routers and subnets as necessary. Ensure all subnets that need to communicate can, and perhaps place a static route for the sever to access the router with the internet interface. Then setup an Access Control List on the router interface that is connected to your internet to only allow the Server IP inbound/outbound access. By using extended ACL's you can only allow the subnet of the server and determine what type of traffic is allowed and on what port. The last line of an ACL will explicitly deny every other kind of traffic from all other subnets crossing that interface. This way you can modify the setup later to allow other hosts internet access by only modifying the ACL to include the relevant subnets. The rest of the network would function as normal once you have nailed the routing protocols so the routers know where all the subnets are. These could be a mixture of static / dynamic routes.