Is it possible

[MaX_PoWah]

to have, well basically one network within another, i am on zen and so therefore get 8 ip's with 5 available for network devices, but recently i have been using more than 5 devices which causes some problems...

My options are, get another 8 ips from zen which will be £50 or i was thinking about getting another router, mainly because i only need external ips for somethings and for things such as access points and network printers i dont really need them, and having them on external ips just makes them vunrable really, especially the printer as i cant seem to secure it.

So is it possible to have, my router, dishing out external ips to the things that need them, ie my computer, my server, then another router attached to it dishing out network ips to the things connected to it, ie a printer, wireless access point, laptops etc, or as i suspect will they just conflict with each other ?

I am thinking you see, that not only would this be safer for some devices especially as they would then be protected by nat, but also it saves me filling out the huge ip application zen have sent me, i am also wondering that should i manage to get such a setup working, could i still share files among all the computers ?

I can see a few more problems as well like but i am wondering if such a thing is even possible ?

 

[m_cozzy]

I am also with zen & have 8 ips, I have 3 servers on the public ip's but the remainder of my network is on a private range behind nat.
It sounds to me like your entire network is on a public range, this is far from ideal. Do you need any of your machines on a public range? Can you not use port forwarding if you need public access?
A router with a dmz port works best for me(cisco 837) so my mailserver, citrix secure gateway & webserver are plugged into that port with the rest of the pc's on the lan port.

A second ethernet router could also be used so:-

internet - existing router - dmz switch - new ethernet router - lan switch

so the new ethernet router would do dhp for your lan & all devices in the dmz would have fixed ip addresses.

 

[MaX_PoWah]

right i think i am following, so basically i need a router with a dmz switch then ? and yea as you say all my devices are on public ips at the moment, which as you said isnt ideal and yea i need my computer and my server on public ips.

There seems to be a cheaper netgear solution, the dg834GT which boasts a single dmz port not quite sure how this would work in practice like or if i could use a range with the dmz port, aparently it has no loopback tho which would effectively cut half of the network off from the other.