Need Help with Home Lan Switching

[anypundit]

I ran out of ethernet ports on my cableco provided Surfboard cable modem/wifi router, so I bought 2 consumer-grade D-Link Gbit switches. With half my LAN in one room, with the other half and the gateway in another, I figured I'd daisy-chain them and plug in the whole LAN and it'd be cheaper than buying 2 more wireless N routers just to act as a wireless bridge. Not quite . . .

I've connected 1 or both to the router together and apart but no connected devices will work. I always get lights when I plug in (I believe yellow is 10/100 and green is Gbit). They are unmanaged AFAIK. Add to that, I have a VOIP adapter and a femtocell and neither will work with any routing or bridging. They have only worked when plugged directly into the gateway. All wifi devices still connect normally to the gateway.

At the moment I'm running:

Gateway: Motorola Surfboard SBG6580 DOCSIS 3.0 at 192.168.0.1 with DHCP on for the subnet.
-D-Link DGS-1008G 8 port switch
-another D-Link Gbit 4 port switch, same category

-2 Windows PC's at 192.168.0.x
-1 linux server PC at 192.168.0.3 static IP
-another linux PC DHCP
-a Vonage gateway
-a Sprint Airave femtocell
-a Linksys WRT54G flashed with DD-WRT running in bridged AP mode (not vital, only provides wifi b/g for legacy devices)

-giving up, I bought a used 48 port Cisco switch from Ebay but I'm waiting on a console adapter to make it work, and that's a totally different issue

Any thoughts on the errant D-Link's?

Thanks!

 

[thiggins]

Linking switches should just work, assuming the ONE cable between each switch is good.

 

[anypundit]

Linking switches should just work, assuming the ONE cable between each switch is good.

As in, I try one patch cable and the lights blink, so I try another in the same ports and see if it blinks as well?

 

[thiggins]

As in, I try one patch cable and the lights blink, so I try another in the same ports and see if it blinks as well?

Yes. But the main thing I was getting at is you should not have more than one cable linking the switches.

 

[PrivateJoker]

Yes. But the main thing I was getting at is you should not have more than one cable linking the switches.

I think Tim is on to something, especially with your use of the phrase "daisy chaining" in your description. Daisy chaining is how old networking was done when the computers were wired together, in a daisy chain, one after the other. Not like today how switches work in a "star topology" with each device being a spoke on a wheel kind of.

Each switch can connect with one cable to your router, or one switch can connect to the other which then connects to the router.

hth

 

[anypundit]

Eureka!

You were both on to something. I think I was trying to turn cheap switches into routers and "repeaters" (one 50' cable will cover my apartment, wall to wall, and along corners and over windows, but I have been known to use a couple of couplings to connect freebie cat5 patch cables.). I was thinking mesh network less than bus or token ring, but I did have too many interconnections.

I rethought my topology and deployed one switch on the far end, and one near the HTPC and such. Each has its own connection to the router, which is in the "server room" (my closet). That'll hold me over until my next project:

Now, just one more moment of your time, if it doesn't take a new thread. My used Cisco Catalyst 48 port switch came in the mail, along, later, with Cisco-to-serial console management cable. I even found a linux box rusty enough to still have a COM port to hook it up to (Ubuntu 10.04). I changed the proper settings in PuTTY, turned it on, fired up PuTTY, and, nothing. "Unable to open connection to to:" and "Unable to open connection to serial port" Any ideas?dmesg | grep tty only ever brings"

[ 0.000000] console [tty0] enabled
[ 1.135613] serial8250: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
[ 1.156061] serial8250: ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
[ 1.176848] 00:0a: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
[ 1.197352] 00:0b: ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A

my guess it's on COM2 because it's the bottom one.

 

[anypundit]

I figured it out

I unplugged all the ethernet cables from the Cisco switch. I found the right serial port, ttyS1, and installed minicom. I set up minicom and plugged in the console cable. I started minicom as root, then plugged in the switch to turn it on. Presto, I'm watching it boot!

Most of the instructions came from http://useopensource.blogspot.com/2007/01/using-cisco-console-in-linux.html