How to test and configure a router without messing with your network

[Mark]

How to test and configure a router without messing with your network

Being able to leave your network untouched is vital for both security and stability issues. If you start plugging routers in willy nilly then it's going to cause problems.

Here's a quick walk through on how to test and configure a router locally without effecting your network.

Your router will have the following configuration or very similar; WAN, Ports 1, 2, 3, 4, power and reset.

The WAN port is used to take a connection from your modem, it's the incoming Internet source. The 1-4 ports are used to connect local machines to your network via an Ethernet (RJ-45) cable. Which is 802.3 on the IEEE standard.

Steps

1. Plug the router's port 1 in to an available Ethernet port on your computer.
2. In either a terminal or command prompt, type ipconfig or ifconfig and grab the default gateway / broadcast IP. This is the routers IP
3. Open up a browser and type that IP into the address bar. The most common ones are: 192.168.1.1, 192.168.1.254 and 192.168.2.1


Possible problems

If like me, you have two Ethernet ports on your board, and both routers are using the same IP you can only configure one at once. IPs can be changed via the web login panel.


This is a very basic walk through just to give you an idea so if you have any problems please hit me up.

[Drumm]

Hehe, You said Willy :tongue.
Most of the time, I find accessing the router useless. Just tells me to go to the Netgear website to fix my online problem :facepalm

[Mark]

When setting up a new device in my network, especially a network i like to change things to suit my layout. Like i have two routers, one as a repeater and i adjust the DHCP pools on both - they're also capped at a certain point to allow my static machines to stay untouched.

Also, with DD-WRT and Tomato i can view bandwidth logs.

[Drumm]

0.o I apologise. I misread. I thought this was a diagnostic thread.