SOAK: Network Configuration Assistance...

[Tivogre]

My network topology is as follows:

FIOS into home.

Fios Router, WAN address 192.168.1.1

Wire from Fios router to Linksys router.

Linksys router: WAN side address 192.168.1.2 (from Fios DHCP)
LAN side address 192.168.70.1

The linksys router serves as my home's wireless access point.

4 Hard wired ports from the linksys router:

1 - 8 port switch serving hard wired devices on the main floor (at media center)

2 - 8 port switch serving hard wired devices on the upper floor

3 through 8 unused.


I recently acquired 5 HD tivos; I want them all networked.

2 of them are hard wired to the switches hanging from the linksys router.

2 of them are connected via wireless G adapter to the linksys wireless router.

They all have IP addresses of 192.168.70.x (statically assigned by me).

All four of these units work flawlessly, and can "see: and "share" with each other.

My final tivo is hard wired to the second wired port on the FIOS router.

It has an IP address of 192.168.1.x (note the the different 3rd node).

This tivo can not communicate with the others, but it gets to the internet fine.

How can I reconfigure my set-up to allow the 5th tivo in the basement to work with the others?

Wireless is not a good option, due to signal strength issues from the upper level to the basement.

I suspect there are som routing table entries I could make in on (or both) routers to make this work... .but I'm no network expert.

Please help.

[SeanC]

My final tivo is hard wired to the second wired port on the FIOS router.

It has a wireless address of 192.168.1.x (note the the different 3rd node).

Did you misspeak in the second sentence and mean to say wired? I ask because unless you have your Tivo connected both wired and wirelessly (and there is no logical reason to do this) then you have a contradiction between those 2 statements.

I'm going to assume you misspoke and say that they way you have your network setup you can't plug anything into the FIOS router and have it communicate back to the stuff behind the linksys.

The simplest solution I can think of is to add a 24 port switch behind the linksys.

[Tivogre]

Did you misspeak in the second sentence and mean to say wired? I ask because unless you have your Tivo connected both wired and wirelessly (and there is no logical reason to do this) then you have a contradiction between those 2 statements.

I'm going to assume you misspoke and say that they way you have your network setup you can't plug anything into the FIOS router and have it communicate back to the stuff behind the linksys.

The simplest solution I can think of is to add a 24 port switch behind the linksys.

Yes.. It is wired. I will correct my original post.

How would a 24 port switch help?

I would LIKE to do this without having to change the addresses of every device on my network.

[SeanC]

There is no reason to change any of the addresses of your network.

From your OP it sounded like you were out of physical ports behind the linksys to plug the last tivo into. Rereading your OP I think I may have misread that.

So my question is, why are you plugging this one tivo directly into the FIOS router? Is it because it is the closest network device with a free port to the tivo?

If that is the reason, just don't plug in there. Either go wireless to the linksys or run a longer cable to get to an open port that is behind the linksys router.

[Tivogre]

There is no reason to change any of the addresses of your network.

From your OP it sounded like you were out of physical ports behind the linksys to plug the last tivo into. Rereading your OP I think I may have misread that.

So my question is, why are you plugging this one tivo directly into the FIOS router? Is it because it is the closest network device with a free port to the tivo?

If that is the reason, just don't plug in there. Either go wireless to the linksys or run a longer cable to get to an open port that is behind the linksys router.

I was just trying to NOT have to run a cable from the UPSTAIRS linksys all the way to the BASEMENT.

The 5th tivo is about 10 feet from the FIOS router; I was hoping there was some way I could leverage that and open all of the Tivos up to each other.

Wireless is not really an option, as the basement Tivo gets very weak wireless signal from the linksys.

[SeanC]

K, yeah, that's what I thought.

It's not really the FIOS router that's the problem. It's that you are using the WAN port on the linksys (nothing wrong with that). But since the linksys is your main router, as you have seen, your 5th tivo can't talk to or be seen by the rest of the network. That's just the WAN port on the linksys doing it's job, hiding everything behind it from everything in front of it.

There may be a better solution out there but as near as I can tell, you have to do the cable run to get it viewable by the other tivos.

[lrhorer]

SeanC is partially correct, but there's a little bit more to it than that. For various reasons I won't go into here, every TiVo must be on the same subnet, which means the traffic between them cannot be routed. Put most simply, this means there cannot be a router between any of the TiVos*, even if the firewall and NAT translation on the router are disabled. Your last TiVo is sitting on the 192.168.1/24 subnet, which means any traffic passing from it to the 192.168.70/24 subnet must be routed. Per my two previous statements, this is a no-no. Incidentally, it also means your firewall router is not protecting this last TiVo, although this may not be an issue. The long and short of it is, all 5 TiVos must be on the same LAN segment. While this means your four Tivos don't have to be re-numbered, the 5th one does have to be renumbered, to 192,168.70.xxx/255.255.255.0, and it needs to be placed on a port on the LAN side of the Linksys router.

I'm a little unsure of the topology, though. I'm only counting 2 of 4 ports used on the LAN side of the Linksys router. Is it that the Linksys router is not near the FIOS router, but the 5th Tivo is? If so, you're just going to have to run another cable between the two sites. Actually, there is a way to have both devices use the same physical cable for communications, but unless there is some overriding reason why this is not practical, I would rather avoid that solution. Let us know, and we can go down that avenue if it is really necessary.

Edit: Reading through the thread again, I think I have the topology down, now. The FIOS router is in the basement with the 5th Tivo, and the Linksys is upstairs. Would it be easier to run the cable from the main floor to the basement? Is the only issue the trouble of running another cable? If so, pulling two cables in by attaching them to an existing cable and pulling it out is usually much easier than it was pulling the original cable in. Again, let us know why, exactly, you don't wish to pull the additional cable.

The other option is to plug the FIOS router into the LAN side of the Linsys router and disable DHCP on the LAN side of the FIOS router. In this case, however, you will need to renumber your devices. I'm not sure I would recommend this, however, because I do not know how good the FIOS firewall is.


*This does not mean more than one TiVo cannot plug into a single router and it does not necessarily mean there cannot be a mix of wired and wireless links. The traffic between LAN ports on a router do not pass traffic through the router if it is bound from one port straight to the other. This will be the case whenever both the source and destination devices are on the same subnet. It will never be the case if the two devices are on different subnets. Logically, the LAN ports are just a switch haging off one side of the router engine. Only traffic passing from the LAN to the WAN actually goes through the router. More properly, any traffic passing from one LAN segment to another must pass through a router. Similarly, the wireless segment is clearly bridged, not routed, as is often the case.

[Tivogre]

Thanks.

I am assuming that this "same side of a router" restriction is a Tivo implementation, as I am NOT having trouble doing outher things (disk mapping , file sharing, etc.) between devices that are "being routed"?

Last night, I realized that I can probably just pull new wire from the 1st floor Switch (hanging off the linksys) down to the basement and hang another switch off there.

There shouldn't be an issue having chained switches, should there?

If this works, it's not TOO bad a wire pull; I can also hard wire a couple of other PCs in the basement (MAME machine, etc.).

Thanks for the help!!!

[SeanC]

I am assuming that this "same side of a router" restriction is a Tivo implementation, as I am NOT having trouble doing outher things (disk mapping , file sharing, etc.) between devices that are "being routed"?

No, it's not a Tivo implementation, it's just how IP routing works. From your linksys' point of view, the FIOS router is the internet. One of the jobs of the WAN port is to protect (firewall) all the devices on the LAN ports from everything that is on the WAN side.

[Tivogre]

Mission accomplished.

I spent more time trying to figure out how to kludge it together than the correct solution actually took me.

In the end, I made ONE compromise... but everything works great!

I had it in my head that to get the 192.168.70.x node to the basement, by wire, I would have to find a path from the linksys router at the top corner of my house to the wiring closet at the opposite bottom corner. After reading all of your inputs, and thinking about the situation a bit more, it hit me...

The wiring closet in the basement is less than 20 feet from the 8 port switch on the main floor behind the media center.

I was easily able to remove the silicone from the holes drilled by the fios installer. At that point, it was easy to pull cat5 from the 1st floor switch to the wiring closet, and voila... an 8 port switch in the basement on the 192.168.70.x node!

While I was at it, I went ahead and hard wired the Guest Room tivo (which was on a wireless adapter) to network as well - again using the fios installers holes. I took that wire back to the media closet, and connected to the new switch.

Finally, I re-connected the basement Tivo from the Fios router port to the new switch.

After verifying everything was good, I re-filled around all the wires with silicone, and zip tied all the new CAT5 wiring to the existing wiring outside.

Total time, about an hour and a half, including assigning the two tivos new static addresses in the 192.168.70.x range.

The one "compromise" (make that two):
1. The basement switch isn't home run back to the linksys router like it was in my old house.

2. The new Cat5 wiring is OUTSIDE the house instead of snaked through inside walls.

All-in-all, I can live with it. Thanks again guys!

[lrhorer]

No, it's not a Tivo implementation, it's just how IP routing works.
That's not quite true. Some of the protocols used in TiVo networking are implemented and / or managed at Layer II. This prevents them from being routed no matter what. Even if the firewall and NAT translation is disabled, one will still not be able to implement things like MRV across network segment boundaries. This is deliberate, to prevent users from squirting video from the Tivo out into the internet. What's more, firewalls and NAT are not typically "just how IP routing works". A typical, non-secure router will freely route IP frames from one segment to the next and back without hindrance. Indeed, as is the case with many enterprise setups, multiple subnets may be hosted out of a single LAN interface. In this case, a packet going from subnet A to subnet B must hit the router, have its next hop address and MAC addresses updated, and then be sent out the very same cable from which the packet came in the first place.

[lrhorer]

There shouldn't be an issue having chained switches, should there?
No. With Ethenret hubs, there is an absolute maximum limit (3) to the number of Ethernet hubs between hosts on a LAN segment due to the way the Ethernet packet collision detection mechanism works, but switches are store-and-forward devices, so chaining four or five of them is not generally a big problem. The only down-side is unless the switches have high bandwidth uplink ports for inter-switch communications, then the single switch-switch link between switches represents a bottleneck in the network. For example, if one has a 24 port Fast-E switch with a fully meshed non-blocking matrix, then hypothetically up to 2.4 Gbps of aggregate traffic can be flowing between the ports of the switch, with a total of up to 100Mbps being delivered to each and every port simultaneously. If one hangs three 8 port switches off a central 5 port switch, however, then aggregate traffic between ports within any one switch can reach as high as 800 Mbps, but the total traffic between all devices on one switch and all devices on a second switch is limited to 100Mbps, as opposed to 800M with a monolithic switch for any given set of 8 ports.

The upshot of this is with all 5 TiVos tied to a single switch, one could MRV at full speed between #1 and #2 while also doing an MRV transfer at full speed from #3 to #4, while also transferring via TTG or TTCB between Tivo #5 and a PC at full speed with no impact to one transfer due to another taking place. With daisy-chained switches, depending on exactly where the TiVos sit in the network, you may suffer a slow-down if you try to perform all three (or even just two) of the transfers simultaneously.

[lrhorer]

The one "compromise" (make that two):
1. The basement switch isn't home run back to the linksys router like it was in my old house.
If I follow you, it's not really much of a compromise. There is no difference at all between plugging two switches into a central switch with a router hanging off it and plugging the router into one switch and the first switch into the second. There is only a very small difference between using a central switch to distribute traffic to three or four switches and daisy-chaining from switch to switch.

2. The new Cat5 wiring is OUTSIDE the house instead of snaked through inside walls.
Is it rated for outdoor use? Most Cat-5 is not, and if not its jacket and insulation is liable to degrade from exposure to the Sun. If it isn't UV rated, you might cover with some exterior ducting, especially if the wire runs on the East or West side of the house. It will prevent jacket failures over time, and it probably looks better, too.

[Tivogre]

So....

Would I gain any advantages to using the "uplink ports" on the linksys switches to connect switch to switch, vs. one of the other ports?

[SeanC]

I'm tempted to answer but I'm not going to bother, lrhorer would just come in say I'm wrong.

[lrhorer]

So....

Would I gain any advantages to using the "uplink ports" on the linksys switches to connect switch to switch, vs. one of the other ports?
Well, there are a couple of different features which may be employed to a port described as an "uplink" port. In some cases, they are higher speed than the other ports on the switch, allowing for greater inter-switch bandwidth. In other cases, they may simply be configured as MDI ports, rather than MDIX ports. What this means, is rather than using a crossover cable between switches, one may employ a straight Ethernet cable by plugging one end into an uplink port on one switch and the other end into an ordinary port on the other switch. More recently, many switch manufacturers have started producing switches with auto-MDI/MDIX ports, allowing the user to employ straight cables whether the device on the other end is a switch or a host. The "poor man's" version of this is to have an N port switch with N+1 RJ-45 connectors. The extra connector is tied to the same port as one of the ordinary connectors (usually either the first or the last), but is simply wired as MDI, rather than MDIX. Some switches also have a little button associated with one of the ports which changes the port from MDIX to MDI. So, at the very least the use of an uplink port will make cabling a bit simpler. At best, if both uplink ports are higher speed ports, it can improve LAN efficiency under load.