I have an office with 4 employee and an internet modem (we purchased 16 IP address with the ISP) what do I do?

Question

16 IP address I purchased because we have 15 employees. Now what do I do to hook it all up. Here is what I am thinking... I hook the dsl modem to the 24 port linksys Switch (SR224) and then have an ethernet wire goto each individual computer... I think that is the correct way to do it since I purchased the extra IP address... (Before I purchased the ip address we had to use a 'router' to designate all of the computers their own IP address... BUT now I do not need that, Am I correct?? ))

I need help on this one...

Answer 1

Yes, connect the DSL modem to the linksys switch, and then each computer to the switch.

Then go to my network places > view network connections. Right click the connection you just plugged in.

You'll see "This connection uses the following items:", scroll down that list until you see "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)". Select it and click properties.

Click 'use the following IP address:' and type in one of the IPs provided by your ISP, along with the subnet mask and default gateway information they provided. Do the same thing with DNS server addresses.

After this, your connection should work just fine. If not, it's because the switch is grabbing an IP address and giving the other computers an 'internal IP'.

To be honest, I don't know why you need 16 IP addresses. Most organizations have one IP that hits the router and all employee traffic goes through that. Other IPs are used for servers that need to be reached from the public internet into your own.

Answer 2

Maybe. It depends on whether your ISP has recycled the address out to another. If not, you will get the same one back again. When you connect to your ISP the first time, you get an assigned IP address from a pool of addresses. There is a time limit on the "license" to this address. When the time runs out, the address is renewed for another period of time.. When you disconnect, your ISP makes the address available for recycling. Later, when you connect again, the first thing your machine tries to do is renew the livense on the last IP address you had. Your ISP will renew the address if it was not given to someone else, so yes, you could very well get the same address back again the next time you log in. This is known as a "dynamic ip" address. The less people on your ISP at any one time, the more likely you will renew the same IP address as the last time you connected.

Answer 3

Why in a small office you would want public IP's on individual machines is beyond my imagination! Don't know who you have for an IT information source but put mildly.... that is a bad use of IP's. I'd keep the router and use private IP's for the LAN in spite of the fact you bought extras.

Since you have them and since you seem to want all the headaches of public IP's on every machine and the inherant exposure that will cause you for security purposes, yes install the switch and put one IP on each machine (include the correct subnet and gateway IP and set the DNS on each machine.) You should be set. (Then sit back and wait 30 minutes before having to correct for attacks -- by the way thirty minutes is the average time from LIVE to attach on the average public IP address.)

You COULD also put these addresses into the DHCP pool of your router and let it assign them to each machine as it connects.

Hope your firewalls, monitoring software (on each machine) and virus software, system pathes, etc. are fully up to date. I hope there are no weak security programs running on any of the 15 machines.

Answer 4

You now need to set the ip information manually to make any sense of the arrangement, this includes the individual dns settings, seems like a lot of extra expense for nothing, you now have 16 machines totally unprotected from the internet. This is a security nightmare. You also now have to consider how you name the machines, they should be using recognised domain names, and should all be entered in the Internet dns. You can not show a private network name to the Internet. Personally I would go back to the router, drop the extra addresses as soon as your contract allows and be safe. You gain nothing, your bandwidth is the same and each machine will be subject to random attacks from outside, I see up to 2000 attacks in one attempt in the logs of my firewalling servers over a period of an hour, plus many isolated shorter attacks every day. I have clients with 300 + machines using a firewalling server into a router and use vpns for external access. In these I have registered mail servers, web and database servers plus Windows domain file servers. I suggest also you hire an it specialist to advise you.