Saturday, April 5, 2008

Setting up a Photo Parata network

A customer called me today. While we talked, he mentioned that he had to turn off his WiFi connection on his laptop to talk to the router on the wired network port he is going to use with his Photo Parata network. I realized he was running into a simple problem, the IP addresses range of the WiFi router and wired router were one in the same.

All the Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link routers I have seen come configured with the router address being 192.168.0.1. The problem is that the computer sees two different networks, both having the same range of addresses, it doesn't know which one to talk to for a given request. The solution is to change one of them. I would recommend changing the router that will be used with Photo Parata.

One must be careful in choosing an IP address to use, for most IP addresses are real address on the real Internet. I know that in the case of the Photo Parata network, must of you are not going to connect the Internet. It is just good policy to follow the standards and pick one of the IP address that is reserved for private networks.

It turns out that 192.168.0.1 is one of those special private network address, hence why all the Linksys , Netgears, and D-Links of the world pick that one. There are a few more of these special IP address ranges that have been reserved for private use. Personally I recommend the class B address of 172.16.0.1. On all the routers I have seen, you simply need to change the router address and everything else will fall into place.

For details on how to make this change, please see the owners manual of your router.












EtherFast Cable/DSL Router with 8-Port Switch



Linksys EtherFast Cable/DSL Router with 4-Port 10/100 Switch (BEFSR41)


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