Re: Router or switch? Please advise

Their response to why they frown on routers is that some people misconfigure them and broadcast their own DHCP signal to the network at large. Only way I could see that happening is if you plugged the school port into the LAN outlet on my router rather than the WAN.

Rod Carty wrote:
I agree, it's a good idea to use a router in the dorm rather than just a switch. Keeping the other students out of the computers in the dorm room is a good idea. I'm not sure why the college people prefer a switch rather than a router, perhaps it's more support for them or something. I doubt the college would give access to servers in their network from the dorm rooms or anything; without full control over the dorm room computers to ensure antivirus, etc. protection is installed they'd only be asking for big troubles. There's a limit on how many switches you can daisy-chain together before delays cause problems for everyone on the network so I would have expected them to prefer routers - they isolate, or reset, those timing issues between the WAN and LAN ports. Even the relatively small college here, which I work on from time to time, had to deal with their network growing large enough that it had to be segmented with routed links on a couple of the longer legs.

Having a DHCP server on the college side makes it easy. The only thing to watch for is if the IP address served up by the college DHCP is the same subnet as the DHCP server in your router. If your son plugs it all in and it works then don't worry about this, but if it doesn't then have him check what network address was given by the college's DHCP server for the WAN port and make sure it's different than the one the router's giving out to computers on it's LAN ports. For example, a Linksys router by default will use a network of 192.168.1.0 with a mask of 255.255.255.0 and hand out addresses starting at 100. That means computers will typically have addresses like 192.168.1.100 and so on. If the first 3 numbers are the same on the WAN port then you have to change the router's DHCP server settings to use a different network number.

Airman Thunderbird wrote:
This is the setup I hope to use when Junior goes to college next month. Each floor of the dorm has it's own DHCP server, according to the school, and they recommend a switch in each room and "frown" on routers, according to the info we've received. But I think it's the way to go.

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