'lo all

I'm trying to network my house, which has 9 of us living in it. We have a netgear ADSL modem/router/switch, and so far one switch. With three free ports on the netgear, and 4 free ports on my switch, everything was fine, and we all could see the whole wide world outside. I now want to add the last two people who have just moved into the house. They have a switch that they can use, and I though it would be an easy job to connect them using that.
With the other switch, I used straight through cables for everything. I did the same thing with the new switch, but nothing works! The light from the router to the new switch flashes, but the poeple who use the new switch can't see anything but the other people on the same switch.

Are you not allowed to have more than one switch going from the one router????

NETGEAR
ROUTER
| | | |
| |
| |------------SWITCH 2
|
SWITCH 1

With two free ports on the netgear for misc. servers.

Any ideas?

glj

P.S. I'm really bad with ASCII art!

It should be possible to install it that way...
What are IPs of all the machines? Maybe IPs of those new machines are from a different subnet than old ones?

Muhaha. Here's the answer (along with some theory) mmmm....theory. Connecting computers to the switch with straight-through cables are perfectly fine. In fact that's the only way to connect a computer to a switch. Now when you go from switch to switch you run into a problem. Normally when you connect a computer to a switch using a straight-through cable the switch "flips" the copper conductor in the cable. Meaning it makes pin 1 on one end pin 6 on the other. (In a manner of speaking) The switch end does the flipping that allows the computer to talk to the devices on the switch. When you go from switch to switch both switches try to "flip" and end up double flipping which just doesn't work and the switches end up flipping out. So if you can to go from switch to switch use an uplink port on ONE end of the switch to switch to cross-connect. Now if you so lucky to have such a device there might be a UPLINK button on the last port of switch that turns it into an uplink port instead of a regular port. Or if you don't have any of this, just go get a 3 foot crossover cable and go directly from regular switch port to regular switch port.

My guess is for the first switch that did work, you inadvertently plugged it into the uplink port or you having a godly consumer-level switch that auto-negotiated the presence of the double flip and acted accordingly.

Mara - IP's won't have anything to do with problem for two reasons. First a switch (at least the kind we are dicussing) is a Layer 2 device. Meaning it only cares about the cabling, Layer 1, and the MAC addressing, Layer 2. His problem exibhits the issues associated incorrect linking between the ports.

Reason 2 the machines weren't going through the router to hit the other people on the other switch. Remember a subnet mask only defines different networks joined together by a router. If there all on the same network(i.e. directly connected through switches)Then they can certainly communicate.


--tarballedtux

Tarballedtux, I agree with you about the cables. I haven't noticed that all cables were straight.
Why I asked about IPs? I know some routers that do NAT for only one, specific subnet (192.168.1., for example) and won't work with any other... If there are other machines have IPs "out of range" the result may be similar to glj's.

Yeah, the only reason I mentioned the whole IP speech is because glj, said Quote: "but the poeple who use the new switch can't see anything but the other people on the same switch."

So he was saying he couldn't see the router either.

--tarballedtux