Home Network & Office Network Problem ?

Bouncy

Bouncy

Bouncy

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Joined
6 Feb 2004
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270
Location
Ballymena
Hi all, i have a Wireless Laptop (Windows XP Professional Edition) and i have a Wireless Netgear Router at Home and also One in my Office, The Office Network is part of a small industrial Estate who all share broadband via a lan point in each of the office walls, to setup my laptop to work in the Office i have to do the following:


Control Panel > Network Connections

In Network Connections it shows my Etherner Port Disconnected as it is supposed to be.

It Shows my Netgear Wireless Card, I right click this card and select

Properties > General > Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) > Properties

Here i have to change the settings to:

Use the following IP address & Use the Following DNS addresses

Here i input the details given by the Business Centre Management and everything works great !!!!

When i get home i can no longer acces my home network because i have changed the settings of the wireless card as explained above and the only way round this is to changed the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Settings back to the way they were, setup as Automatically ???

Is there a way round this so i can have the one wireless card configured for both Networks without the silly procedure i'm doing to allow me to access them both ?

Many thanks in advance
 
Because the Broadband is setup via the HQ in the Business Centre every Office has been given it's own IP addresses which can't be changed :( i know in Vista i can setup as many different configurations as i wish and select which 1 i need to use at any particular time and it works perfectly (But Vista is only in BETA at the minute) but i have no idea how to do it in XP ?
 
You could always configure your router at home to use the same network information as your work connection.

I am guessing that your work dish out IP addresses in one of the following ranges :-

172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255
10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255
192.168.0.1 to 192.168.255.255


Do an ipconfig on your laptop, if your default gateway is 10.0.0.1 and your subnetmask is 255.255.255.0 then use those values.

The other option is if you are using statically assigned IP addresses both at work and at home if you go into your ip address configuration advanced tab you can set up 2 different ip addresses on the same interface, can be a bit of a pain due to picking default gateways and DNS servers tho.
 
thanks for that, i'll give it a go ! why can't there be an easier way to do this for e.g. when i go into network connections where it lists all the ways i can connect to networks, when i see my netgear wireless card listed why can't u create more listings of the same card but allowing you to have different configurations for each one listed, when one isn't in use you can right click and select disable for e.g. Netgear Wireless Card 1 Netgear Wireless Card 2 Netgear Wireless Card 3 etc etc........... all the exact same card but each setup differently depending on which network u r joining, the one required will be enabled automatically disabling the rest ! what do u think ?
 
Urgh, get your work to actually have an IT infrastructure.......


Even if you all share broadband you should still be able to have a dhcp sever. If they don't have one at work I'm sure you could set up one of the computers in your office to act as one, so that it essentially does the same as you entering the IPs manually.

I don't think there is a really simple way round it, as essentially one way you are doing it using DHCP (the sensible way), and the other you are hard coding it.

In essence, complain until they do something about the shonky IT. I dare say they can probably do it already with the kit they have, the just don't know how.
 
i know i use DHCP at home which allows auto assigned IP addresses, I think it's setup as it is so they can limit how many machines per office, dunno maybe i'm wrong?
 
This is very simple to fix. Just logon to your router at home, and change it's IP Address settings to fit the office layout. So setup your home router to use the same IP Address as you are given for the gateway at work.

Change the DHCP range to also fit into this same network. And for bonus points, reconfigure the DHCP pool in your home router to avoid allocating the IP Address of your laptop. (Assuming you have other computers in your house, we don't want them to be given clashing addresses)

It is quite easy really. :)


(BTW - Have you tried using the "Alternate Configuration" page when setting the TCP/IP Address on your laptop? I thought that this page was for your exact request. THough I have never used this myself)
 
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