Nexland ISB-Pro800 Router (Page 2)
Nexland
"An Advanced Sharing Device"
Manufacturer: Nexland
By: Jack Kolesar
09-04-02
Network Setup
The preceding diagram, drawn in DIA, shows my home/office
network layout. Debbie, LinuxBox, and Laptop are all basic client computers
which will share the internet connection for browsing and email purposes.
The operating systems are Win 2000, Gentoo Linux, and Win 98 respectively.
WAP is the wireless access point which acts as a hub to the Laptop. The Server
is also running Gentoo Linux and has ports mapped through for WEB, SSH,
SSL, and FTP servers. This layout is a bit more advanced than a typical shared
environment and worked well for testing out the router. Rather than go through
every single config page of the web-based administration for the router,
I will walk you through what was needed to be done for this setup.
Setting Up The Router
If you simply plan to share your internet connection using
DHCP, there is no configuration that is needed. The ISB-Pro800 will work
right out of the box. Simply plug the cable or DSL modem into the WAN port
(furthest to left) and connect your computers to the remaining ports. That's
it! The router will assign IP addresses to the client computers automatically
as long as they are configured for DHCP.
While this configuration works fine, I prefer to use static IP addresses
with my small network. In addition, my computers were already set to the
192.168.1.0 network. By default, the router is set to the 192.168.0.0 network.
To change this, we have to log into the router via the web interface. The
easiest way to do this is to set one computer up to receive a DHCP broadcast.
Otherwise, we would not be able to access the web interface because the router
is on a different network. Once this is done, the configuration is only a
couple of mouse clicks away.
To log into the router simply enter 192.168.0.1 into the
web browser of your choice. Here is where you will have access to the countless
configuration options of the router. In order to change the router's LAN IP address, we will simply click on the LAN IP & DHCP link. Here you
can set the IP, network mask, and DHCP settings. If you want to use a mix
of static and DHCP addresses, it is easy to set the start and end range of
the DHCP server. Since I wasn't planning on using it, I disabled DHCP all
together. If you are changing to a different network like I did above, you
will also have to change the network on the DHCP Server range even if you
are disabling it. Once you have these settings configured to your liking,
simply hit save. It is important to note that if you change the IP address
of the router to a different network, you will immediately loose access to
the web interface. You will then have to set the client computer up properly,
reboot if necessary, and login again.
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