I have a small office and am installing DSL. My current setup is a Dell server with MS 2003 standard. i have 5 workstations and they are all connected through a FS116 netgear switch. i have the DSL modem set up. if i connect a laptop straight to the modem its on the internet. what i would like to do is run the DSL through a linksys wireless router for future wireless capabilities. what would be the best/easiest way to connect the DSL to the current network without having to set anything up on the server? i was thinking to go from the modem, to the router, then to the switch. is port 16 on the switch the up link? i'm a little new to the network side. Thanks

yes you should be able to hook the netgear switch to the linksys router and the router to the modem. everything has to have it's own ip address, so the easiest thing that you could do is to hook the linksys to the laptop and change the ip of the linksys to something other than the netgear's ip address. then hook them up the way you described. if you are using DHCP for auto ip's then everything on the netgear will be on one range of ip's (example: 192.168.0.100-192.168.0.199) and everything thats connected to the linksys will have ip's on another range (example: 192.168.1.100-192.168.1.199) notice the third part of the ip numbers. the netgear has a 0 and the linksys has a 1. So find out the ip of the netgear and make sure the ip of the linksys is different. dodger

dodger88, The netgear FS116 is an unmanaged switch, not a router, so it won't have an IP range. bowtie1, Connect the modem to the WAN port of the wireless router, then connect from one of the router's LAN ports to the switch. Set all of the computers to use DHCP and enable the DHCP server on the router (most routers are enabled by default). Instructions on enabling the DHCP server comes with the router.

thank you for your inputs. i will be trying this this evening. i'll keep you posted and i may be leaving another message around 6:30pm eastern while i am at this place of business.

You have to use caution when connecting the DSL modem to the WAN port of the Linksys router. If the DSL modem is doing NAT and you connect it to the WAN port of the Linksys, then the clients connected to the Netgear switch are going to be double NAT-ed. In theory it should work, but sometimes it doesn't. If the DSL is simply bridging then the proposed setup should work.

This would be my suggestion. Never connect any business computer/network to the intenet. It becomes difficult to protect the system and data. Do you need internet? Consider two setups. One that has protected intenet access and one that had no intenet connection. You need to protect your data first. If you must connect then I'd consider a linux firewall router box to go between your lan and isp. Block everything except what is needed, and only when needed too. I would only use wireless when no wired solution exists.