Creeva’s World 2.0

No this is is not a review or rec­om­men­da­tion post — the exam­in­ing equip­ment posts cover the equip­ment I already own and what func­tions I wish to do with them.

Ever find that the equip­ment man­u­als are ter­ri­ble or you just can not find a ye or no answer on how some­ht­ing functions?

That i my problem.

Buried in a closet down­stairs is a wire­less router that is not being used. In my new net­work design — I want to use it, but I need it to have NAT dis­abled so I can go between both seg­ments with their real IP addresses. So I need it to act as a true wire­less router and the man­ual says noth­ing about this type of function.

The router is a MN-700 Wire­less b/g router by Microsoft. When I lived in Ore­gon it served the pur­pose for a cou­ple years but got replaced when I moved back to Ohio. With my new net­work design though I’m going to have at least 2 wire­less zones (2 more planned in the future when I have cash) . So I’m stuck on that ques­tion until I have time later to hook it all up and con­fig­ure it. But the man­ual should have this information.

But what else am I going to do with it beyond com­plain about the lack of of text in the manual?

Well let’s look at the rest of the pur­pose of this machine (other machines men­tioned we will go into detail in a later examing­ing equipment.

The MN-700 will ide­ally be put into a con­fig­u­ra­tion such as the fol­l­low­ing off the firewall

Wired Clients <—-> MN-700 <---wired---> Fire­wall
|
Wire­less Clients <——
|
Wire­less Bridge <——

I will be uing WPA encryp­tion on the Clients and the wire­less bridge as this wire­less net­work is going to be behind my main fire­wall (which has 4 inter­faces) I want nat­ting dis­abled since I’ll be com­ing through the fire­wall to the wired clients at the very least — and would like to be able to reach all the computers.

Why do I need to reach all the computers?

Remem­ber the mantra to fol­low is cen­tral man­age­ment and ease of use — while my net­work setup when we get through this whole series may not be the eas­i­est to under­stand nor to con­fig­ure. When we get to the end users they should not be able to see any impact on their nor­mal usage and it should make every­thing easy and trans­par­ent. Hope­fully it will also make every­thing more func­tional where the users are inter­act­ing with ser­vices they didn’t know existed on the network.

Being able to reach all the com­put­ers means that I can VNC (cov­ered in a later arti­cle) across the net­work to any machine form any other machine I’m on (as long as I know the pass­word.) This ful­fills cen­tral­ized man­age­ment and since most my servers run head­less (with­out a mon­i­tor attached) it allows me to admin­is­trate them with­out have the elec­tric bill com­pounded by the elec­tric­ity that a mon­i­tor would use.

I also have at least one com­puter on that seg­ment where VNC com­mu­ni­ca­tion is imper­a­tive and there is a file share on that same com­puter. The rea­son for this will be cov­ered in a later arti­cle when I get to that computer.

What other func­tions will this router provide?

This router on top of his WPA encryp­tion will be fil­ter­ing client by mac address and not all of the clients will have a sta­tic IP address. So the router will also be the DHCP that ser­vices this net­work seg­ment ( for the record there will be 2 other DHCP servers on the net­work and no I don’t want to go DHCP repeater ser­vices so I can have a cen­tral one). The DHCP pool is going to be wide enough for 20 addresses in case I get other remote device that need access via the secured wire­less segment.

The router will allow for exter­nal man­ag­ment so from my cen­tral desk­top or lap­top I can adjust or make any con­fig­u­ra­tion changes nec­es­sary in a future adjustment.

I’m fairly sure this cov­ers my work­ing with this wire­less router — I’ll have a fol­low up later on the MN-700 which will include screen­shots of the interface.