WLAN To LAN Communication

MunkyHed

Hi Guys,

I've setup a small office with Wireless LAN connectivity. The laptops come in and are given a DHCP IP adddress of the range 172.31.x.x
I'm tring to setup a printer so these laptops can connect to it and print away.
I tried a Belkin Wireless print server but it was brutal. It would only let one person connect at a time and kept dropping off the network when the printer was idle.
I decided to setup a PC to act as a print server and gave it a LAN connection back to the same router that supplies the wireless connectivity.
The router (Sonicwall TZ170W) has a firewall built in so I added a rule allowing any protocol access from WLAN to LAN.
The LAN IP range is 192.168.x.x
I cannot ping the LAN computer from WLAN laptops or connect to the printer (Obviously)
Is there a way to connect WLAN computers to wired PCs in the same router???
Or is there a better way of providing a printer to the wirelss laptops in the office??

PS.. I suck at networking

Feelgood

Hey Munky,

Does your printer have a network port on it??. i.e. can your plug a network cable into it?

I can't really make out what your saying, though looking at it I would say the main problem is that your LAN and your laptops are on two different subnets. To get from 172.31.x.x to 192.168.x.x you would have to create a static route in the router.

Try putting everything in the office on the one subnet. That is everything has an address of 192.168.x.x...

MunkyHed

Hi Feelgood. Yes the printer has a network port, I could just connect directly? If I set the printer to 172.31.x.x then that should work I guess. I take your point that the wireless and LAN should all be the one subnet. I could try that. In theory then all the PCs, wired or wireless could talk to each other in the range 192.168.x.x
Does that sound right?

helios

The easiest way is to get everyone on the same subnet, and let DHCP do all the work. Set your printer to DHCP, plug it into your router, and you should be working. If you had different subnets, you'd just be over-complicating everything. Unless you have a specific need, it's generally best to have everything on DHCP, especially on a network with very few clients...

Feelgood

MunkyHed wrote: »

Hi Feelgood. Yes the printer has a network port, I could just connect directly? If I set the printer to 172.31.x.x then that should work I guess. I take your point that the wireless and LAN should all be the one subnet. I could try that. In theory then all the PCs, wired or wireless could talk to each other in the range 192.168.x.x
Does that sound right?

Yep thats bang on., but remember the printer has to have an IP address 192.168.x.x too!. You should be able to set and IP address on the printer control panel if it has an ethernet network port.

Look at it this way, its like saying everyone in the Dublin area can make phone calls to each other by omitting the 01, but if someone from Louth trys to dial a Dublin number without the 01 they wont get through and the communication wont work.

Its kinda of like that with routers to. Say 192.168.x.x is the Dublin area and 172.31.x.x is the Louth area. They can't talk to each other because they don't know how to get to each other. So essentially you have to tell the router where 192.168.x.x is by creating a static route. The static is say the area code 01 that allows for communication between the two.

You have two options. Set all your network kit to be 172.31.x.x or to be 192.168.x.x.

Sample config.

192.168.10.1 = LAN Router.
192.168.10.2 = Wireless Router
192.168.10.3 = Network Printer
192.168.10.4 = Windows / Unix Server

192.168.10.10 to 192.168.10.100 = DHCP pool. i.e. available IP addresses for laptops. Set your wireless router to be the DHCP server if you are using all laptops in the office.

Now everything is in the one area or network so they can all see each other...

Feelgood

helios wrote: »

The easiest way is to get everyone on the same subnet, and let DHCP do all the work. Set your printer to DHCP, plug it into your router, and you should be working. If you had different subnets, you'd just be over-complicating everything. Unless you have a specific need, it's generally best to have everything on DHCP, especially on a network with very few clients...

Hey helios, only thing there is that if the printer is set to DHCP the address of the printer would change periodically. So when you set the printer up in windows / linux and you give it an IP address of say 192.168.10.4, chances are this address could change when the DHCP lease is up of if the router is restarted. Is always best to give printers static addresses that wont change.

Webmonkey

Feelgood wrote: »

Hey helios, only thing there is that if the printer is set to DHCP the address of the printer would change periodically. So when you set the printer up in windows / linux and you give it an IP address of say 192.168.10.4, chances are this address could change when the DHCP lease is up of if the router is restarted. Is always best to give printers static addresses that wont change.

Yep or Static DHCP using printers MAC addy

MunkyHed

Thanks for the help lads, I'll just reset the wireless DHCP subnet to match the wired subnet and secify the same gateway. Hopefully It'll all work. The sonicwall router I'm using can map a static IP address to any MAC address you specify so I'll do that with the printers. I'm learning fast, this networking lark is easy enough!