So, a part the already told problem with the phone cable on the street, during this month I also had to fight with the house’s cabling.
I think I already wrote in the past about my problems with noise on the DSL and other funny stuff like that. I then decided, while I was waiting for the telcos to finally fix my line, to change the split cable I was using with a single long cable, and see if that helped. Unfortunately, I found that one of the cable pieces, the important one, being non-telephone cable, cannot be replaced: it’s stuck there.
For this reason, I ended up moving the ADSL router on the main floor, directly on the socket I was given by Telecom, and this actually improved the situation, a bit. I was planning to bridge the 8-port switch I have on this floor to the wireless network provided by the ADSL router with the old access point, a D-Link DWL-700AP.. too bad it doesn’t seem to like working as a bridge.
As a result, right now I’m connected with the iBook working as second router to join the two networks. I ordered a LinkSys WRT54GL-EU router but it will arrive probably only next Monday. Anyway, I also decided to split the two networks so that if I have guests they won’t be allowed to access the services of the wired LAN that are a bit more private.. but then, I had to forward the ports (80, 8080, 443 and so on) of the Internet IP to the addresses of the wired LAN, that are not on the same subnetwork. Usually it shouldn’t be an issue but…
3Com’s interface seemed to allow me to specify only the same network’s addresses when configuring virtual servers. The router had 192.168.1.1⁄24 as LAN address, and I always got 192.168.1.** to choose for the destination of the port forwarding. I then tried using a /16 address, trying to split the network later on, but didn’t work either, always the last octet was free to choose .. so I tried to use, instead of two /24 or a split /16, two subnetworks, /28, so that the only change was in the last octet and… miracle, it worked! 😛 The router (192.168.0.17⁄28) is gladly accepting farragut’s address (192.168.0.35⁄28) as destination of the port forwarding. Seems like whoever wrote the 3Com’s web interface really has little clue about how networks and subnetworks works, and even routing might be out of their understanding, if they require that the destination of the port forwarding is on the same network as the router …
Yes of course to work correctly with that setup, I have to set static routing of the 192.168.0.32⁄28 network through the other router, and yes, I’m limiting a lot the number of clients that I can connect with wireless, but that is all I need after all, I never had more than two extraneous laptops here…
Oh well… I just hope I’ll be able to put OpenWRT on the LinkSys without big troubles, I’d like to use it to move out dnsmasq and ddclient from this box, so that farragut won’t need enterprise anymore for anything … I already tried using 3Com’s DDNS support before, but they lack support for hostmasks so I could only use flameeyes.is-a-geek.org without the VHosts 🙁
3Com produces good routers, they work just fine, never had a single performance problem since I use this one, but their interface, although better than, say, Belkin’s, still has a few rough points I’m afraid…