Originally Posted by acid_kewpie

A home user switch is probably THE most basic piece of powered IT equipment it's possible to buy, save for those bendy USB lights. No config required.

Originally Posted by foyonoro

Last question (hopefully). Will it be able to connect wireless as well?

Originally Posted by phil.d.g

A switch? shouldn't think so.

Your router? depends if it has got the capability

Originally Posted by phil.d.g

I can't see how what you say will work. Imagine a machine on the WAN side of your router with an address 192.168.0.10 and one on the LAN side with an address 192.168.0.50, both with a net-mask of 255.255.255.0.

If you try to send a packet from .50 to .10, .50 is going to look in it's routing table and determine that .10 is local, so will try to resolve .10 to a hardware address. However, .10 is one hop away on the other side of the router. The only way it can get that packet to .10 is to send it via the router.

The reverse direction is even worse, because if you forced the packet to go via the router (from .10 to .50) by manually altering the routing table, the router is just going to drop it because it doesn't do routing, just NAT.

Not to mention the confusion the router is going to suffer having both it's WAN and LAN ports in 192.168.0.0/24

Most consumer routers have 4 LAN ports and one WAN port, so you can use the router as a switch by just using the LAN ports and not connecting anything to the WAN port.

Turning off DHCP doesn't turn a router into a switch.

Perhaps the OP can answer my earlier question so we can determine if they need a router or a switch, and also let us know what routers (manufacturer and model) they have.

Originally Posted by Dani1973

You cannot give IP adresses from the same subnet on the wan and lan side of a router, it just wont work and routers will most probably refuse that configuration (at least they should). Also the computers will never send their packages to the router (default gateway) if the destination address is in the same subnet.

I used lots of routers as 'simple switch' for particular reasons (for example if you want to use the wifi on the router but not the routing/nat functionality itself).
To do this simply switch off DHCP on that router and give the router a IP address outside off your subnet (remember that address otherwise you might have to reset your router everytime you want to make changes to the wifi settings).
If you still wanna give the router a IP address inside you current subnet just make sure it's not the same as any other devices (like your default-gateway) and outside the dhcp range.

This is nice if you have a router with wifi that you don't use anymore and don't want to spend uneccessary money on a access point.

PS : forgot to add this ... if you use a router in such a way you simply cannot use the WAN port!!! Only the LAN ports will work as expected!!!

Originally Posted by djsmiley2k

Heh....

What if you've got an ISP who gives you 5 public IPs?

In that case, you STILL need a gateway (the router), but you dont want NAT, as each IP will be publicly available. Such setups like PPPoE would use this.

I have at home a simple old linksys router which does exactly this. Turn the NAT off and it simple advertises the IP's on the lan ports, of course it expects public IPs and gets a little confused when it sees you using 192 ranges...

Originally Posted by Dani1973

Of course they exist otherwise the internet would be a mess (well netwroking in general would be).

NAT is a extra functionality on top of a router but lots of soho routers don't have the option to switch it off.

Originally Posted by foyonoro

Thanks. Do you know how to tell if a router has the option to turn this off? I cant tell by looking at the specs of routers on sale.

Originally Posted by stress_junkie

A lot of manufacturers or retailers make the user manual of new products available on line. The user manual of any product would tell you the features of that product and how to implement them.

You can use Google to search for the product brand and model.

Example: Google search phrase


Result: several web sites that appear to have the user manual in pdf format.

In order to avoid virus infected pdf files I only went to the cisco web site and clicked a few links to get to the user manual for the wrt54gs router.

http://homesupport.cisco.com/en-us/w...sysbycisco.com

Note that I believe that you originally wanted someone to post a quick shopping list of routers known to provide this function. I am sorry that nobody did that. Evidently few if any of us have done this. I guess that we would all just buy a switch.