[larrams]

last year I set up a simple office network for a friend. He had 3 pc's and a coupel extra cables for 2 laptops all connencted through a cnet 8 port swithc. Everything running xp pro sp2, except his laptop on vista basic.

Everything ran great until they got flow installed last week. For the first day it ran smooth on the 2 pc's they had operating. Since then, only one pc can connect to the internet and none of the pc's can connect through the network.

Someone told me that it was the fault of flow, and directed me here.

Any suggestions?

[guy_smiley]

The reason that only one PC works is that the flow modem has associated the MAC address of that PC with the IP address it is handing out.
You will need to reset the modem before it will hand out an address to another system.

Now.. how did they connect their little peer to peer network to Flow?
Just connected the modem to the switch?

They need to buy a router .. a wireless one will do (they can turn off the wifi radio if no system is using wifi).

Connect the Flow modem to the WAN port of the router.

Connect the router to the switch via one of its LAN ports.

Set each PC to obtain IP address automatically. Make sure DHCP is ON on the router.

So.. each machine on the network will get its IP address from the router. Their gateway address and dns addresses will be that of the router. The router itself will have the actual gateway, DNS and IP address assigned by Flow. The router will do NAT, allowing all of the machines to access the internet via the one IP address assigned by the Flow modem to the router. The firewall on the router will protect the computers on the LAN.

[guy_smiley]

Alternately, since they only have 5 machines, they can use ICS (internet connection sharing).

If one of the computers has two network cards, one NIC is connected to Flow modem, the other to the switch.
Otherwise, you can use the USB connection from the Flow modem to the computer.
Share the internet connection using ICS.

So that machine is now acting like a router, sharing its connection with the other machines on the LAN.
The gateway machine will have a static address on the LAN NIC (192.168.0.1) with the other machines using it as their gateway and DNS. The other systems can use static IPs.

A windows machine sucks as a router however... go with the hardware router and do the thing properly

[srnoth]

Yup, guy smiley pretty much covered it. Not the fault of Flow really, just people are used to TSTT's DSL modems which have always had routers built in, and thus could be connected directly to a switch, and would hand out private IP addresses (192.168.254.*).

The flow modem on the other hand is exactly that - a modem. So it connects whatever is plugged into it directly to the internet. So you definitely don't want to plug it straight into your network switch - that's almost like giving the entire world access to your network. Very slack of the Flow guys to install it like that in the first place.

So as guy smiley said, you need to either purchase a router, or connect the Flow modem to one of the computers via USB, and use internet connection sharing to share the connection with the rest of the computers. If it's XP pro you're running it should be able to share it with 10 other computers.

[guy_smiley]

I cringe at the thought of a small business relying on an XP machine (especially one that is being actively used as a workstation) to protect their data and do routing.

Especially when a decent router like the Linksys WRT54GL is 70 USD.

About three years ago someone asked me to look at one of their servers. Man I laughed like hell to see a Compaq Proliant NT4 Server (running IAS) with games installed. Especially when I saw about 4 trojan processes running and the (unpatched) web browser (all sorts of toolbar crap installed) with a history full of #### and game sites.

[Lich King]

guy_smiley, on Mar 29 2008, 10:46 AM, said:

I cringe at the thought of a small business relying on an XP machine (especially one that is being actively used as a workstation) to protect their data and do routing.

Especially when a decent router like the Linksys WRT54GL is 70 USD.

About three years ago someone asked me to look at one of their servers. Man I laughed like hell to see a Compaq Proliant NT4 Server (running IAS) with games installed. Especially when I saw about 4 trojan processes running and the (unpatched) web browser (all sorts of toolbar crap installed) with a history full of #### and game sites.

XP machine not bad but you would be wasting like 300W of power to leave that pc powered all the time just to get internet shared. It will bottleneck too so best you invest in a decent router. You probably don't need a WRT54GL, any regular router would work especially since you probably won't be messing around with the router by installing linux firmware on it. You better off with a regular WRT54G because linksys got back smart and started using the latest Broadcom BCM5354 chipset in it instead of that Atheros crap.

[srnoth]

Lich King, on Mar 29 2008, 06:28 PM, said:

XP machine not bad but you would be wasting like 300W of power to leave that pc powered all the time just to get internet shared. It will bottleneck too so best you invest in a decent router. You probably don't need a WRT54GL, any regular router would work especially since you probably won't be messing around with the router by installing linux firmware on it. You better off with a regular WRT54G because linksys got back smart and started using the latest Broadcom BCM5354 chipset in it instead of that Atheros crap.

Actually I've been looking at the newer Linksys routers and the WRT-150N seems like the better option now. It is US$90 instead of US$50-60 for the regular WRT54g, but it is supported fully by the linux firmwares (like dd-wrt), and will support the 802.11N protocol when it is fully ratified.

I agree with you though that if a person has no plans to install custom firmware like that, then the regular WRT-54G is the best option available.