IT Employment

Ask something
Question Locked

Topology Question

0 helpful
6 replies

by matthew.balthrop

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

I have a quick question. I am purchasing an 800 Series Cisco Router. I currently have a WRT54G wireless router for my home network. I am studying for the CCNA exam and i have been needing a Router with IOS and CLI capable. Alright, on to the question. I am looking at setting up a physical hybrid/dual star topology where the 800 Series Router will run Ethernet to a Hub, and then the Hub will route to a PC and and WRT54G Router. The WRT54G Router will then route to another PC. I am wondering, if tunneling into the 800 Series Router i will be able to globally configure the WRT54G Router, or would i have to actually tunnel into the WRT54G to configure it? The reason i ask is because i know that the WRT54G is not CLI capable. Any feedback here would be great.

-alias

6 replies

by brenton keegan

Well, what's going to happen, out of the box the Linksys is going to hand out private IP addresses and behave entirely independent regardless of what it's plugged into. Everything that's plugged into it will become a separate network. It will just route all traffic to whatever the next hop is.

Without knowing a whole lot about what you are doing, I'd say that this doesn't seem like the best of designs. You have a router going to a hub, going to another router going to a pc. This sort of bus topology creates several single points of failure and everything further down the bus loses connection if something fails.

I'm not sure what you mean by "configure globally" but if I were to take a guess I would say that you mean you want the cisco box to do the actual routing and the linksys box to just act as an access point. That's what I would look into if I were you.

by robo_dev

is to disable DHCP in the WRT, set it to a static address, and plug one of the LAN ports into the cisco router. that way you effectively convert it from a router to a layer-2 ethernet switch/wlan access point.

by matthew.balthrop

I do apologize for not being more in-depth, Network Administration is still a rather new topic to me. I know it's not a great design, but i was wanting to design something that would give me plenty to troubleshoot and configure. So robo, due to the fact that the WRT will not allow me to use CLI, i should essentially just create an access point out of it, and allow it to configure the PC that is routed to it? Will the 800 Series Router be able to communicate effectively with all nodes with this design? I just want to get some input from those who are more knowledgable then I before i make this inventment.

-alias

by matthew.balthrop

My original idea was to try and create two physical topologies, simply to attempt and make it more complex to configure then just one Physical star and Logical Bus. Like i said earlier, i am still rather new and learning so this would be more trial and error then anything. Also, starting to learn subnetting and want a design that i could possibly experiement with this.

-alias

This discussion is closed to new replies.