networking

[pedplar]

I am in the planning stage of setting Linuxmce up.  I need some info on networking.  Right now, I am using wireless.  But in the coming weeks I will be running wires through out the house.  I plan on having the core setup in the basement, with 4+ MD through out the house.  I still need the wireless for the laptops.  I think I will need 2 nics in the core? The MD won't need internet access. 


Here is how I was gonna wire everything up. 

                                               cable modem
                                                      |
                  Regular computers <--  wrt54gs --> wireless to Laptops
                                                   |       |
                                                Pap2     |
                                                           |
                                                        core
                                                          |
                                    MD1 --> switch or hub <-- MD 2                                                   
                                                 |       |     |
                                              MD3    MD4  MD5
I want LinuxMCE to have its own network.  Should I use a switch or will a hub work fine.  Will this work ok
Thank you to all that helps.

[Hagen]

You will want a switch, especially if it's likely that more than one MD will be used simultaniously.
A hub basicly has 100MB available for all the ports, and sends all the info to all the ports, meaning that at full 'troughput' a hub can only serve each MD with 15-20MB at best (not counting all the 'collisions'), far too little for a stable and good system.
A switch will route the data to the appropriate receiver, threreby speeding up delivery considerably.

(this is the quick and dirty simplified explenation, for more info I suggest you try wikipedia.com  )

[pedplar]

Ok so I will get a switch for my setup.  Will my wiring diagram work right?

[Hagen]

It looks ok to me, but this setup means you can not access the laptops and computers from LMCE.
Just so you are aware of that limitation

[tschak909]

we all work towards the day when we can add a "Cook Me Breakfast" scenario to our orbiters. :-P

-Thom

[pedplar]

Actually I never thought of the regular computers not accessing it.  how can I change it so everything will access the core

[teedge77]

theres no reason you couldnt access the core from there. youll have to have the firewall off.

[dopey]

You can configure the wrt54gs to be the internet gateway without being the DHCP server for the house and still have all your computers connected to the wrt54gs .

Method 1:
You will need to setup an appropriate VLAN that will allow one of your Ethernet ports to connect to LinuxMCE's External interface, which routes to the wrt54gs WAN port, and the rest be a dumb switch that connects to LinuxMCE's internal interface. The wrt54gs will route everything connected to the external interface out to the internet (first going through it's internal firewall) all all the rest will be routed to LinuxMCE. If any one of your computers need to connect to the internet it will first go through the wrt54gs to LinuxMCE and then back to the wrt54gs out to the internet. This method is pretty secure, but if you don't know how to setup the wrt54gs to do this...

Method 2:
This one is the easiest. Give the wrt54gs an IP on a differnt subnet as the LinuxMCE core and make sure the dhcp server is turned off on the wrt54gs. Connect the only NIC (yes you only need one for this) on the LinuxMCE core to one of the LAN ports on the wrt54gs. Tell LinuxMCE to connect to the internet using the gateway IP that you set on the wrt54gs and manually set the IP address for LinuxMCE's external interface (even though there is one NIC there will be 2 interfaces) to an IP on the same subnet as the IP you set the wrt54gs to. The end result is all traffic will flow through the wrt54gs and all internet traffic will be routed out via the wrt54gs.

[Zaerc]

You could just connect the wrt54gs to the switch on the internal side of the core.

[dopey]

Yes, but that would make the Core serve the internet, which seems to be not what he wants. It's not the most secure solution, but it is the default one and the one I use...

At least before my Core died... for the third time... due to electrical surges of all things... and yes I have a surge protector... not that they're really any good when a real electrical surge occurs inside the house...