Subj : Network setup To : Ben Carpenter From : mark lewis Date : Tue Nov 05 2002 08:44 pm BC> My first gut reaction to this question was yes but when BC> looking at it is is checked and grayed out so I can not BC> change it. you may not be able to change it... at least not without a specific registry tweak... it may also break the ability to talk with the others until you get them all configured the same way... it does indicate that you are doing netbios over tcp/ip... BC> No time today to look farther on this. I do not have BC> print or file sharing checked in the TCP/IP but they BC> are checked in the NETBIOS. yeah, that's fine... FWIW: this win98se box doesn't have netbios installed specifically... it only shows tcp/ip but network neighborhood works and i talk to all the machines on my network... m$ got sneaky not long after win95 hit the streets and knowledgable folk started working with the thing... BC>> What would be the difference be between the machine BC>> you described with 4 NIC's compared to the present BC>> DSL router and 3 more routers behind that? ml>> that one machine can act as those 3 routers... however, ml>> it'll take linux and configuration of an ipchains or ml>> iptables routing firewall structure... it can be very ml>> convoluted if you try to route between the cards but ml>> should be pretty straight forward otherwise... since ml>> each card will have an address in each network, it'll do ml>> the work of them... BC> At this time the extra machine does not sound to me like BC> a route I want to take along with the new learning curve BC> it would require to learn Linux. know that feeling... its taken me quite a bit of time to get my main linux box up and running with the current configuration it has... its my samba server, print server, router, firewall, master time server, and quite a few other things i can't think of at the moment... [trim] BC> I do not know how fast his machine was but I know that BC> he only had two card in it one for the cable connection BC> and one for the network connection and used a hub to BC> connect the workstations, and he did not use that machine BC> for anything else at all. yes, that's one thing that happens... he was also probably running into two situations that many aren't aware of... those two cards were probably slow cards... even on linux, there are some that are mostly driven in software... yeah, winnics if you will... and the other is the hub... packets are broadcast to every port on a plain hub... this is why switches are much better... they are intelligent and do not broadcast the packets to all ports but know what machine is connected to what port... switches do not have a collision light on them... there is no such thing in a switch like there is in a plain hub... [trim] BC> At this point we will drop this until later when it might BC> be needed. no problem... BC> Frank Reid has made some comments. Do you care to comment BC> on his comments. it gets kinda deep at times... the netmask stuff might do what you are wanting to do... the netmask stuff in a binary inverse of the bitmapped addresses you are using... i haven't fully grasped it all but have worked with them for quite a while... i generally know what i want to do as far as subnetting and use a subnet calculator to tell me what i need for x numbers of nets of y machines... he is right, though, in that the netbios stuff may still get thru... using the routers like yuo initially asked about, if they also include firewall capabilities, you could simply block ports 137, 138 and 139 and that'll stop all netbios traffic from getting thru them... you'd want to do that on the port that links the routers together or just do it on the fourth router that those routers plug into... you don't want them to stop your groups from communicating within themselves... only to stop them from communicating with machine outside the group... BC> Over all at this point I am just getting information and BC> not doing any experiments at all. That will come at some BC> time in the future ( about a month from now) when I may BC> have a little more time on my hands. know that feeling... there's a lot that one can do and the stuff is very simple... its just that it is so simple that you can get lost in it... anyway, ask away if you have any more... i'm sure there's more folk in here than just the 5 or 6 of us that have spoken up so far... )\/(ark * Origin: (1:3634/12) .