Routers? Am i missing something?

Hey all,

I need a router to go between two switches.

One switch is on a different subnet to the other and they need to be linked
like a remote site link, only all in the same rack. Essencially a fake remote
site.

Out of all the routers i've seen, they all seem to be WAN, ADSL or Routers
with Switches in. Am I missing something? Can you not just buy a
straightforward router and stick it between two different-subnet switches?

I dont want to route anything to ADSL or WAN. Just want to connect two
networks/switches together that are on seperate subs.

What do I need? Small Business here so we dont have a meaty budget.

Cheers.
-------------
Chris White
United Kingdom

Chris,

Consumer-grade routers usually have built-in switches and ports for
connection to WAN media. Business-grade routers can also have these
features, but frequently have many more options. Try looking (for example)
at the Cisco 800 series routers. There are models which should do what you
want, although you may have to get one with a built-in switch (which you can
simply ignore). Larger routers without a switch are substantially more
money.

John Baker

Chris White <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I need a router to go between two switches.
>
> One switch is on a different subnet to the other and they need to be
> linked like a remote site link, only all in the same rack.
> Essencially a fake remote site.
>
> Out of all the routers i've seen, they all seem to be WAN, ADSL or
> Routers with Switches in. Am I missing something? Can you not just
> buy a straightforward router and stick it between two
> different-subnet switches?
>
> I dont want to route anything to ADSL or WAN. Just want to connect two
> networks/switches together that are on seperate subs.
>
> What do I need? Small Business here so we dont have a meaty budget.
>
> Cheers.
> -------------
> Chris White
> United Kingdom

In addition to the other reply, perhaps what you might better use is an
Ethernet switch capable of creating VLANs.

Hey there,

Thanks for the reply.

I've been looking at the Cisco 850 Model. How do you ignore the switch
ports? Do you just wire up the 850 via the switch ports built in, connecting
one port to the existing switch and one to the new switch like a bridge?

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6195/index.html

Will the internal nature of the Cisco 850 deal with connecting two different
subnet switches together? Or will it cause a collission frenzy.

Cheers.
--
Chris White
United Kingdom


"JRB Associates" wrote:

> Chris,
>
> Consumer-grade routers usually have built-in switches and ports for
> connection to WAN media. Business-grade routers can also have these
> features, but frequently have many more options. Try looking (for example)
> at the Cisco 800 series routers. There are models which should do what you
> want, although you may have to get one with a built-in switch (which you can
> simply ignore). Larger routers without a switch are substantially more
> money.
>
> John Baker
>
>
>

Based on what you are doing, the simplest thing might just be a dual NIC
machine with Windows and RRAS.

"Chris White" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:99FD56F6-4722-4E79-8F91-(E-Mail Removed)...
> Hey there,
>
> Thanks for the reply.
>
> I've been looking at the Cisco 850 Model. How do you ignore the switch
> ports? Do you just wire up the 850 via the switch ports built in,
> connecting
> one port to the existing switch and one to the new switch like a bridge?
>
> http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6195/index.html
>
> Will the internal nature of the Cisco 850 deal with connecting two
> different
> subnet switches together? Or will it cause a collission frenzy.
>
> Cheers.
> --
> Chris White
> United Kingdom
>
>
> "JRB Associates" wrote:
>
>> Chris,
>>
>> Consumer-grade routers usually have built-in switches and ports for
>> connection to WAN media. Business-grade routers can also have these
>> features, but frequently have many more options. Try looking (for
>> example)
>> at the Cisco 800 series routers. There are models which should do what
>> you
>> want, although you may have to get one with a built-in switch (which you
>> can
>> simply ignore). Larger routers without a switch are substantially more
>> money.
>>
>> John Baker
>>
>>
>>

Hey,

Been warned off this by other MVP's who had analysed my model and plans more
closely.

Thanks for the information but its just using up another machine we don't
have bandwidth to dedicate with.

We wish to do this with hardware, products that is dedicated to this job
rather than having a server which is running loads of stuff un-related to
Routing.

--
Chris White
United Kingdom


"JRB Associates" wrote:

> Chris,
>
> Consumer-grade routers usually have built-in switches and ports for
> connection to WAN media. Business-grade routers can also have these
> features, but frequently have many more options. Try looking (for example)
> at the Cisco 800 series routers. There are models which should do what you
> want, although you may have to get one with a built-in switch (which you can
> simply ignore). Larger routers without a switch are substantially more
> money.
>
> John Baker
>
>
>

Well I spoke with Anthony over at the DFS & FRS groups about this but it
looked like a Layer 2 / Layer 3 switch was going to be very expensive.

Our current switches (Netgear GS725T's x 3) have been very very reliable and
efficient to be honest. They do support VLAN's but you can't assign IP's and
Subnets to them. Just group ports together to create better efficiency.

The plan is something along the lines of this plan i knocked up: -
http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d1...-O-Deathv2.gif

--
Chris White
United Kingdom


"Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]" wrote:

> Chris White <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> > Hey all,
> >
> > I need a router to go between two switches.
> >
> > One switch is on a different subnet to the other and they need to be
> > linked like a remote site link, only all in the same rack.
> > Essencially a fake remote site.
> >
> > Out of all the routers i've seen, they all seem to be WAN, ADSL or
> > Routers with Switches in. Am I missing something? Can you not just
> > buy a straightforward router and stick it between two
> > different-subnet switches?
> >
> > I dont want to route anything to ADSL or WAN. Just want to connect two
> > networks/switches together that are on seperate subs.
> >
> > What do I need? Small Business here so we dont have a meaty budget.
> >
> > Cheers.
> > -------------
> > Chris White
> > United Kingdom
>
> In addition to the other reply, perhaps what you might better use is an
> Ethernet switch capable of creating VLANs.
>
>
>

Chris,

The quick answer is that you don't ignore the switch ports, you configure
and use them.

My business has used an 871 for several years, and it is great; powerful,
flexible and reliable. The 851 is similar, just targeted for smaller
businesses (fewer users).

The device has six ports, four are LAN (RJ-45 and represent the "switch"),
the fifth is the WAN (RJ-45) and the sixth is a serial port for connecting
and configuring the device (if you don't use the built-in web interface).

The four LAN (switch) ports are each independently configurable. You need to
use one for your inside connection, but you can easily disable the other
three. For a very small office, without any other switches, it is just fine,
and all the ports can be used. For a larger office, then disabling three of
the four ports, and connecting the remaining one to an external switch is
just fine.

Depending on the model you choose, the WAN port can be a plain RJ-45 which
connects to an external modem (or other device) or have a built-in modem for
ADSL, ISDN or other WAN technology. I prefer the plain RJ-45 WAN port,
because it allows me to choose a separate external modem, and hence upgrade
as required over time, without replacing everything. For what you describe,
it also sounds like what you may want.

The sixth port, serial, allows the router to be configured from something
like a laptop, running a terminal program. If you know and are comfortable
with, the Cisco command line interface, it is all you need to configure the
system. If you don't; the systems have a built-in web browser interface,
which works over the LAN ports. It is quite configurable, so most anything
is possible. The only down side to Cisco, versus consumer-grade, is that it
does require that you have rather good knowledge of what you are doing.
Yes... there are wizards, but they still require knowledge far beyond the
consumer level.

If you are comfortable with the concepts involved, and don't mind the
effort, Cisco is fantastic; if not, then find a simple consumer-grade
device.

Best of luck,
John Baker

I can sympathise with you but can't offer any real suggestions. New simple
LAN routers have gone the way of hubs - ie to that great electronic
graveyard in the sky.

As suggested earlier you can use an old PC. You don't even need a server
OS and RRAS. You can use NT/XP workstation or Linux as a simple LAN router,
which is all you would need for this exercise.

If you are looking at this as a "proof of concept" exercise you could
always use a virtual machine and virtual networks and routers (using VPC or
Virtual Server). It could even be all you need in any case. Just plug the
host machine into your existing switch and either use the host as a router
to your vm or build a vm to route between the physical and virtual networks.
You don't even need the second switch. You use a virtual one. You don't need
any additional hardware but you would need an additional OS licence or two
for the vms. VPC and Virtual Server are both free.

Regardless of what hardware/software solution you use, the actual
routing is straight-forward. You put the new machines in their own subnet
(say 192.168.17.0/24). You set the 192.168.17 address of the router as the
default gateway for the new subnet. You will probably need to add some extra
routing to the existing subnet to get the traffic for your new subnet to
your LAN router if the existing subnet is set up to use some other router as
its default gateway.

That got a bit convoluted. Simple IP routing just works without adding
anything if the router is the default gateway for both subnets. If one
subnet uses another gateway you need extra routing to get the traffic for
the "other" private subnet to the LAN router instead of to the default
gateway.

"Chris White" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:AE2E000B-0441-406B-8AD6-(E-Mail Removed)...
> Well I spoke with Anthony over at the DFS & FRS groups about this but it
> looked like a Layer 2 / Layer 3 switch was going to be very expensive.
>
> Our current switches (Netgear GS725T's x 3) have been very very reliable
> and
> efficient to be honest. They do support VLAN's but you can't assign IP's
> and
> Subnets to them. Just group ports together to create better efficiency.
>
> The plan is something along the lines of this plan i knocked up: -
> http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d1...-O-Deathv2.gif
>
> --
> Chris White
> United Kingdom
>
>
> "Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]" wrote:
>
>> Chris White <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>> > Hey all,
>> >
>> > I need a router to go between two switches.
>> >
>> > One switch is on a different subnet to the other and they need to be
>> > linked like a remote site link, only all in the same rack.
>> > Essencially a fake remote site.
>> >
>> > Out of all the routers i've seen, they all seem to be WAN, ADSL or
>> > Routers with Switches in. Am I missing something? Can you not just
>> > buy a straightforward router and stick it between two
>> > different-subnet switches?
>> >
>> > I dont want to route anything to ADSL or WAN. Just want to connect two
>> > networks/switches together that are on seperate subs.
>> >
>> > What do I need? Small Business here so we dont have a meaty budget.
>> >
>> > Cheers.
>> > -------------
>> > Chris White
>> > United Kingdom
>>
>> In addition to the other reply, perhaps what you might better use is an
>> Ethernet switch capable of creating VLANs.
>>
>>
>>