Rate my setup

[Eos]

Here is how our office will be laid out.

I have DSL and she has her own cable internet. The room has pre-wired cat5 jacks as you can see in the image. The modem is behind a panel in the master closet, distributing to the entire house. We both have two NIC's each. One for internet and one for sharing. We have been sharing files/printer via crossover cable and it's been slow, but flawless for 6 months. I have a router (stock WRT54GL) now, for wireless capabilities and bringing home a VOIP phone for work. The router needs to be near my desk for plugging in the VOIP phone and I wanted to use her internet for it as she does less bt than I do.

I want to avoid the router for my connection, just because I do so much bt, I'd like the pathway from computer to peers to be as short as possible.

Anything stick out as being wrong with this plan? Inefficient I can handle, but wrong I'd like to remedy. Is it possible that our sharing transfer speeds will increase with the router? Currently, the best we can do is about 10mb/s (350 mb files transfer in about 30 seconds).

 

[skyking]

do you have multiple WAN IPs? does the dsl modem have multiple LAN jacks?

 

[Eos]

Each internet connection has it's own dynamic WAN IP.
It's a Westell 6100 DSL modem, so there's just a single ethernet LAN port.

 

[skyking]

sorry, I looked at your diagram and did not read. there is no cable modem on it.
Two nics will work for the file and printer sharing, and the speed of 10MBYTE is right on target for a 100mBIT ethernet connection. The only way to improve that is with gigabit ethernet between computers.
Don't hook any one machine with two cables to one router or switch, as your diagram suggests.

 

[Eos]

Originally posted by: skyking
sorry, I looked at your diagram and did not read. there is no cable modem on it.
Two nics will work for the file and printer sharing, and the speed of 10MBYTE is right on target for a 100mBIT ethernet connection. The only way to improve that is with gigabit ethernet between computers.
Don't hook any one machine with two cables to one router or switch, as your diagram suggests.

The cable modem is behind a panel in the master closet.

Are you saying that two separate NIC's on one computer cannot terminate at the same router? One for internet and one for sharing. Both computers have two NIC's.

 

[skyking]

it won't help at all to use two nics that way. the windows boxes won't load share file transfers. I'd install gigabit network adapters if you don't already have them, and fileshare with those.

 

[Eos]

Originally posted by: skyking
it won't help at all to use two nics that way. the windows boxes won't load share file transfers. I'd install gigabit network adapters if you don't already have them, and fileshare with those.

I guess I'm confused. I've been using two NIC's this way (NIC to NIC via crossover cable) for 6 months. Each computer has another NIC for internet.
Using a router from secondary NIC through router to secondary NIC instead of a crossover cable from secondary NIC to secondary NIC is enough of a difference for it not to work?

 

[skyking]

there's no need for the second cable if that router is going to be the internet gateway for her computer.

 

[JackMDS]

Create two Independent Networks.

One connected to the DSL and an other connected to the Cable.

Each one comprised of its own computer/computers.

Take out the second NICs from all computers; leave only one computer, which runs WinXP Pro, with two NICs.

Use WinXP Pro bridging capacity to bridge the two Networks.

This page describes bridging with other type of Network, but you can infer the principle.

http://www.homenethelp.com/web/howto/windows-xp-bridge-setup.asp

Otherwise, "Kinky" configurations lead to "Kinky" results.

 

[Eos]

Originally posted by: skyking
there's no need for the second cable if that router is going to be the internet gateway for her computer.

I see. The second NIC on her computer is inefficient as far as sharing is concerned. The data can transfer just fine through one combo NIC as it can through a dedicated NIC.

The second cable run is unecessary, IOW.

 

[blemoine]

on a scale of 1-10
10 being the highest and 1 being the lowest

i would rate this setup a 3.263428736

using 2 nics is not really helping anything. here is a much easier setup

if you must use dsl and cable get two seperate routers. use the same ip subnet on both and give them different lan ip addresses. connect them via crossover cable. connect your pc to routerA and her computer to routerB. set your computer to use RouterA's IP as the default gateway and her computer to use RouterB's ip as her default gateway.

ip subnet would be something like 192.168.1.0
255.255.255.0

router A lan ip 192.168.1.1
router B lan ip 192.168.1.2

your pc ip address 192.168.1.100
255.255.255.0
192.168.1.1

her pc ip address 192.168.1.101
255.255.255.0
192.168.1.2

 

[Eos]

It's odd the general consensus is that two separate internet connections is an odd thing...

I do aprpeciate the input. It gives me a better idea of what was wrong with my plan.