Adding a 1Gbps switch to my network which has wireless router and wireless adapters

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Hi folks,

I recently switched to Sky Broadband Unlimited from Pipex since they added their LLU product to my local exchange and using my Master phone socket downstairs, I can get about 11-11.5Mbps broadband which is a huge improvement over the old 5.5Mbps with Pipex.

The Sky Router though, only has 2 10/100 ports which is a real downer, and to my knowledge nobody's figured out yet how to get your sky username out of the router's settings yet so that we can use our own routers, as Sky don't provide the log in details for the actual ADSL connection.

So I decided to stick with the Sky router for now, and as my 2 PC's and CCTV DVR are located upstairs where the old Netgear DG834G Router used to be, I bought 2 of the TP-Link TL-WN821N Wireless N 300Mbps Wireless USB Adapters and one TP-Link 5 Port 1Gbps Switch (TL-SG1005D) from Overclockers UK.

I have the Wireless USB adapters working fine and am getting my 11Mbps broadband quite happily, but today linked my 2 PC's together via the built-in LAN connectors to the 1Gbps switch upstairs. I'm using Windows 7 64bit Home Premium on both PC's.

The internet is fine, through the USB adapters, but both PC's are still seeing each other through the Homegroup via the Wireless USB adapters and Sky Router, where as I want the USB adapters to provide internet access and use the Gigabit switch to connect the PC's together for big file transfers.

How do I go about forcing the PC's to talk to each other via the 1Gbps switch, but use their wireless USB adapters for the broadband internet?

2010-10-10_1416.png


My thanks if you can help, I thought there would be lots of guides on adding a switch to wireless network by now as so many routers still don't yet have 1Gbps built-in switches.
 
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Associate
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Hi thanks, more or less the same thing, forcing file transfers through the 1Gbps switch. It doesn't really tell you how to do it though?

I can probably figure out how to get the LAN Adapters to have their own IP addresses, but what exactly do you put in the hosts file?
Or do I add the IP addresses and the restart the Homegroup wizard?

This is how my Windows Network Centre looks at present...

2010-10-10_1427.png
 
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J.B

J.B

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The only way I can see of doing it is with static routing...sort of

You'd need to set access the other PC by using its APIP adress which by default should be 169.254.x.x using this IP will force the connection over the wired interface.
 
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Hi,
Thanks, just reading up on APIPA, never heard of it before.
I just set the 2 Wired LAN Adapters to 169.254.0.1 and 169.254.0.2 respectively on each PC and set them to a subnet of 255.255.0.0, what would I need to do next to force the connection between them over the wired interface or is it done automatically?

Thanks!
 
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Getting somewhat confused now (!) but here's the routing table from the Router:

Destination Mask Gateway Metric Active
89.200.128.40 255.255.255.255 0.0.0.0 0 YES
192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 0.0.0.0 0 YES
0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 89.200.128.40 0 YES
 
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Each of your PCs will have 2 network connections then, so use the DHCP addresses for the broadband and for the switch network assign a different range of IP addresses

i.e.
Broadband = 192.168.1.x / 255.255.255.0 (dhcp assigned)
LAN Switch = 10.0.0.x / 255.255.255.0 (manually assigned)

If you then drop the names of the machines into each others hosts file with the 10.0.0.x IP address it will always access them via that IP

There is no need for a static route, windows will work out which subnets the nics are sitting on and if it needs to send to the 10.0.0.x subnet it will use the nic that is attached to that network

Static routes are only required when you have more than one gateway router
 
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What a nightmare...!

I set the 2 LAN adapters with fixed IP addresses and edited both hosts files on each PC to force the connections through the LAN adapters.

The main problem seems to be with the Windows 7 Network and Sharing Centre.
I finally got both PC's to use the Homegroup on the Lan Adapters and got them both using the Wireless Adapters as Work connections. The Network Maps for both networks looked great.

When I rebooted the computers, both PC's defaulted their LAN adapters back to Public Network instead of Homegroup. I'm assuming the Homegroups should be on the LAN adapters, although I suspect on my Wireless Laptop I will no longer be able to see the Homegroup resources.

Why is this so difficult to achieve? Perhaps I should have bought a Wireless Access Point to connect to the switch to link it downstairs to the ADSL Router, instead of using a Wireless USB adapter on each PC or get a long Cat5 cable to link the switch upstairs to the router downstairs.
 
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