network problem at my work

[-Anti-]

I wonder if anyone could help with this.

Part of our school network is a little library with four computers (with wifi cards) and a printer. One acts as the printer server, connected to it by a cable. The rest have to be connected the network to print to it (as a network share).

The computers used to get their connection from a wireless router, but over the summer it stopped working. So now our little library has no internet and only one computer that can print.

The (new) technician is far too busy to solve this problem for at least a couple of weeks. So I'm trying to solve it for myself in the meantime. I hooked up an old wifi router of mine in place of the dead one. All the computers now have internet. However, they do not appear on the school network, and can't even 'see' each other, even though they are connected to the same router; the printing obviously doesn't work. It's like the router is acting like an internet gateway, but is keeping itself separate from the rest of the network.

My mistake is probably the router settings:

· IP: 192.168.0.1 (I don't know what subnet any of the other school routers use)
· Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
· Default Gateway: 0.0.0.0
· AP mode (as opposed to 'client')
· DHCP server mode on

I *thought* that I should probably disable DHCP, use 'client' mode, and specify a default gateway if I wanted to make the router a part of the wider school network, but when I tried to use these settings I couldn't reconnect to the router and had to reset it to factary default. However, I didn't know what to change default gateway to, so maybe that is why it didn't work?

Anyway, I don't really need to be connected to the rest of the school network, but I don't understand why the four computers that are connected to the router can access the internet, but cannot see each other or use the printer?

Thanks for any suggestions/ideas.

[Rock]

Anyway, I don't really need to be connected to the rest of the school network, but I don't understand why the four computers that are connected to the router can access the internet, but cannot see each other or use the printer?

Thanks for any suggestions/ideas.

Hi,

Which OS is installed on all of these machines? You might want to check whether they are in a workgroup or a domain [Active Directory]. If they are in a workgroup, the workgroup name should be similar [eg. WORKGROUP, HOME, etc]. You can try the Network Setup wizard [XP] or Diagnose network connection [Vista] located in the Start > Control panel > Network Connections. Here you can configure Internet and network settings on a computer or on a home network. You can also try searching for the printers/computers in the network, through the find/search option in the start menu. Let us know how that goes.. Good luck

[-Anti-]

Thanks for your reply.

They are all XP machines and all in the same workgroup. The other thing I didn't mention is that the user account is extremely limited and locked-down; I don't know the admin login details, nor do I have the XP disk. This means most of the network options are greyed out (including the diagnose option) and I don't even have cmd access.

I can use the network and printer search though, but it doesn't see any other computers. I also connected my vista laptop to the router, and it couldn't see the XP computers either.

But can I assume by your reply that I should be able to stick a router into a network like this, and it should just 'become part of the wider network'? I'm only used to dealing with home networks where there is just one router, and it is connected directly to the modem.

Thanks for any further ideas.

[-Anti-]

I'm still stuck on this, although I made some progress (I think).

The wireless router is connected by LAN cable to a switch (which is in turn connected to the school's main router/gateway).

I've managed to change my router's ip from 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.1.10. I did this because the main router has an ip of 192.168.1.1 and I thought that it was best that they are operating on the same 'subnet'. I also changed the dchp ip range to 192.168.1.230/240, to match the subnet of the routers.

So I can connect to my router, get allocated an ip like the rest of the school (192.168.1.x) and the internet works. But the problem still persists that none of the computers that connect to my router can see each other, and nor are they connected with the rest of the network.

I assumed that once I managed to to get everything on the same subnet, that the router would become part of the main network. This isn't happening though.

Any ideas?
Thanks.

[-Anti-]

Just to say I eventually solved this.

The basic error I made was connecting the wireless router to the existing network using its WAN port. Secondary to that, I was trying to manually change the router's IP address to be on the same subnet as the gateway router when there is no need to.

Eventually I worked out that I should not use the WAN port at all, but instead connect the existing network to a lan port on the new router. I suppose then, that the wifi router works more-or-less like a normal switch/hub, automatically letting the existing gateway handle dhcp, dns, etc for the computers then connected to the wifi router.

Finally, I also didn't realise that the wireless connection in most routers is purposely kept separate from the wired connection for security reasons. Our wired network is called 'default', so I expected the wireless SSID to have to be the same as that. In other words, I assumed both lan connection and wireless connection had to connect to the existing network ('default'). However, there was no need once I had the above lan problem fixed. The lan connects to 'default', but the wifi has it's own network connection called 'wifi'. What seems to happen is that 'wifi' becomes and extension of the existing 'default' network.

Anyway, the key was not to use the wan port. Once that is corrected, everything else is pretty much automatic; I didn't need to change *any* of the wifi router's default settings.

Cheers.

[Rock]

Haha quite a confusion.. glad that you got it sorted, I was out of ideas