Question about internal/external network

[kefkakiller]

I am trying to setup my new linuxmce install but need some advice on the networking.

Here is the current situation. Upstairs is my modem, wireless router, gigabit switch, and fileserver. Downstairs is a wireless bridge and the only linuxmce box. The router is running DHCP and handing out ips in the 192.168.1 range. Currently I have the external NIC on the linuxmce machine plugged into the wireless bridge. The internal interface running DHCP (in 192.168.80) is not currently plugged into anything.

Now the linuxmce computer does not detect the fileserver, I assume because it doesn't search for devices on the external network. Now I'm not very enthused about having DHCP running on the linuxmce box because the only device that I want linuxmce to even connect to is the fileserver. In addition I only have the one wireless bridge connecting the upstairs and downstairs so I don't think that I would be able to use that link for both the internal connection to the fileserver and the external connection to the router.

The only way I can really see it working is to put the modem and router downstairs and move the bridge upstairs, which I guess I can do but it is really suboptimal.

Sorry for the long post, but does anyone have any suggestions?

[kefkakiller]

Should I have posted this in installation?

[teedge77]

maybe a diagram would help?

[darrenmason]

My only suggestion would be to pull out/disable one of your network cards in the linuxMCE box and run as a single card setup. I have not done this but there is a lot of forum posts discussing it.
You basically don't want an external network in your setup as you are plugging into an existing network and not acting as the gateway. As far as I know people have this setup working - but linuxMCE CORE was originally designed to act as the gateway so I'm guessing that if it sees two cards it will think that you want it to be the gateway by default.

HTH
Darren

[kefkakiller]

Per request, here is the layout.


I'll look into the single card setup.

Thank you all for your replies.

[colinjones]

I would agree, single NIC config would be the way to go - but you need to resolve your DHCP issue. Do you really need the router to hand out the leases? The network seems quite static so you could probably turn off the router DHCP service, use a single subnet and let LMCE do DHCP. Unless you do this it will not find your file server - LMCE doesn't "scan" the LAN it relies on DHCP - when a client requests a lease, it provides it, but then uses that IP address to do the pnp and find your file server. Failing that, I'm assuming that you could just add the file server as a device manually with the static IP address in the web admin, it should then find the shares on its own...

[kefkakiller]

Yeah after reading this post, I will try to do a single NIC setup and have DHCP on the linuxmce box. I'll play around with it over the weekend when I have some time.

Thanks.

[teedge77]

my file server has a static ip and its found ....a little too often....never re-setup the device template to use a file server...so it just keeps asking and i keep sayin wait....but its static and it finds it fine. (thats with a single nic installation also)

[Hagen]

There is a "cheat" to do what you need.
First you need to configure the DHCP server in LMCE to use the same subnet and IP range as your "normal" home net
Disable the DHCP in the router
Hook the internal nic up to the bridge
LMCE now acts (or should act) as the DHCP server and will find the server (most likely), and the server will most likely not change IP adress (it didn't for me) as it is just renewing a lease and not requesting a new IP.
Set up the server, IE answer the onscreen prompts the way you want.
Now you can switch off DHCP on the LMCE machine and switch DHCP back on the router.

LMCE will now know about your server, and anything you connect to the local machine will still be discovered.

It's a cheat, but it's the simplest way to make it work without setting up a server manually (I haven't gotten that to work very well because I'm no guru).