- Jan 13, 2014
- 8
- 0
- 10,510
As my list of internet-ready devices continues to grow, I'm about to have an electrician come in to run additional Cat5 wiring through my house. Having slowly grown to a very ad hoc network of three wireless routers, I realized that it was time to try and be a little more systematic, so I bought a CISCO SG100-D-08 unmanaged (layer 2) network switch.
Here's my problem: I originally connected the switch to my Actiontec MI424 WR cable-modem / wireless router and then started plugging devices into my switch. While this worked initially (e.g., one of my desktops had internet access, an xbox had internet access, etc), each device fairly quickly lost connectivity. My PC was the easiest to look at: it had no IP address assigned and I could do nothing to reestablish connection. Trust me, I tried many of the usual tricks: static IP assignment, resetting adapters, power cycles, etc. The XBox was a little easier to get back online: power-cycling the modem, switch and Xbox WOULD get me a connection, but it was normally gone within 5 minutes.
What's interesting - and somewhat telling - is that I managed to fix everything by putting an Asus RT-N66U (wireless) router between the Actiontec router and the Cisco switch. Note that all connections are hardwired and that the Actiontec has a router built into it that has been supporting upwards of a dozen devices on a LAN that had been built exclusively with (wireless) routers. Now that the CISCO switch hangs off of the Asus router (which hangs off of the Actiontec), all of the devices connected to the Cisco switch seem to have a stable and reliable connection. This suggests that either the Actiontec router won't support layer-2 switching directly or (more likely I hope) that I need to make some setting adjustments.
Any ideas?
Thanks
Here's my problem: I originally connected the switch to my Actiontec MI424 WR cable-modem / wireless router and then started plugging devices into my switch. While this worked initially (e.g., one of my desktops had internet access, an xbox had internet access, etc), each device fairly quickly lost connectivity. My PC was the easiest to look at: it had no IP address assigned and I could do nothing to reestablish connection. Trust me, I tried many of the usual tricks: static IP assignment, resetting adapters, power cycles, etc. The XBox was a little easier to get back online: power-cycling the modem, switch and Xbox WOULD get me a connection, but it was normally gone within 5 minutes.
What's interesting - and somewhat telling - is that I managed to fix everything by putting an Asus RT-N66U (wireless) router between the Actiontec router and the Cisco switch. Note that all connections are hardwired and that the Actiontec has a router built into it that has been supporting upwards of a dozen devices on a LAN that had been built exclusively with (wireless) routers. Now that the CISCO switch hangs off of the Asus router (which hangs off of the Actiontec), all of the devices connected to the Cisco switch seem to have a stable and reliable connection. This suggests that either the Actiontec router won't support layer-2 switching directly or (more likely I hope) that I need to make some setting adjustments.
Any ideas?
Thanks
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