Networking 2 IP ranges in WXP

Please explain your IP range bit more.

I want to help you but dont want to suggest something with a mistunderstanding of your question.

By IP range do you mean each PC's ip?
192.168.1.1
192.168.1.2

or different IP masks?
192.168.2.X
192.168.1.X


Or are you meaning your connection to the internet?

And by default windows 95,98 and M.E use WINS and windows 2000 and XP are setup to use DNS to find other machines. The Windows 2000 and XP machines probably don't have a WINS address.

Anyway before I explain more I would just like clarification on my reply above.

=) Look forward to helpin' ya out!

Ok, sorry, but maybe I'm even too hopeless to be helped. Some of the PCs each have an IP in the range 192.168.34.X. These use the gateway 192.168.34.1, and the subnet mask on these is 255.255.255.0. The other machines each have an IP in the range of 209.66.21.2xx, with the gateway  209.66.21.209, and the subnet mask 255.255.255.240. I don't know if this helps, but thanks for trying...

Icran,

It is not possible to use both connections to the internet without a server.

Something has come up and I cannot help you out until around {10.45PM GMT (English Time) }

I will talk you through all the things you need to consider then. No one is too hopeless to be helped! :P

Why dont you list any other questions about your network and I'll also go over those 4 you.

See ya later

Here is what I would do in your situation

#1 Make sure that netbios over tcp/ip is enables.  
Go to your network adapter's properties sheet.  Double-click the TCP/IP entry.  Click on the "Advanced" button.  Make sure that enable netbios over TCP/IP is selected.  Say OK.

--try the printer--

#2 Add an entry for the printer in the host file (c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\host; or c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\host) for your printer.  In order to find an IP address for a host (such as a printer), the computer checks the hosts file first by default.  Open the file in notepad, scroll down the the area where there is space and add the line

[ipaddress of your printer]     -TAB-       [name of the printe]      -TAB-     [fully qualified domain name]
example
209.66.21.210                              LibraryPrinter                  LibraryPrinter.libraryname.us.ne

The fully qualified domain name is optional as some people don't have a domain.

--try the printer--

#3  The printer does not have to be set up via the netbios name.  i.e. \\209.66.21.10 is just as good as \\librarylaser.  
a.)  If that does not work, start by creating a new printer
b.) choose a local printer (no, you don't want to auto detect)
c.) create a new port -->standard TCP/IP port
d.) Put in the IP address of your printer (the name it choses in the second blank is fine)
e.) Choose your printer type.  If your printer type is not in the list, select custom and go with the defaults
f.) Load the drivers for this printer (from disk).
g.) test print

You might even have a port still set up.  If you do, use this.                                

The 209.66.21.209 address are "public" addresses. This means they are assigned by your ISP and any PC that is assigned one of these addresses is potentially easily accessable from any other other PC on the internet.

Your 192.168.34.x addresses are "private" addresses and cannot directly connect to the internet, the gateway at 192.168.34.1 will be providing functionality to share one public address between all of the 192.168.34.x PCs for the purpose of browsing the internet. Having the PCs hidden behind this kind of gateway will also help protect them from various internet attacks.

These IP addresses are needed when you are using the TCP/IP protocol, which is the standard for most networks, and the only way you are going to be accessing the internet. TCP/IP addressing is used to create independent networks that are not visible to each other unless you have some device that explicitly connects them.

In your case you have created one network "209.66.21.2xx" and another "192.168.34.1". Because these are in completely different address ranges they cannot directly see each other. Each can see the internet through their respective gateways though, as you have discovered.

Now, if both of your networks were using private addresses, you could just stick all the PCs in one private network and set the default gateway to determine how they accessed the internet. Because you have one network using private addresses and another using public, this will not work. The PCs that tried to use the 209.66.21.209 gateway would not be able to access the internet because they are not visible to the internet and have no device letting them share the address that is (209.66.21.209).

Now you might think "let's give them all a public address" this might work except you only have 14 public addresses (209.66.21.209 to 209.66.21.222) and one is used by the router. If you only had 13 PCs this solution could work because the 192.168.34.1 gateway does not care that the PCs accesing the internet through it happend to have a public address, it will happily keep sharing its public address between them.

If you want more than 13 PCs to access each other and the internet now you will have to decide how you want to configure your network as you are probably going to have to alter the configuration of one of the gateways and possibly buy an additional piece of networking hardware. At this stage you might also want to think about seperating the public PCs from PCs used by staff.

Last thing, you said all the PCs could talk to each other when you installed NetBUI, this is because NetBUI is seperate from TCP/IP and therefore doesn't use IP addresses at all. You could try installing NetBUI on all your machines for the purpose of accessing each other and shared printers, but this always seems to turn out to be majorly unreliable. The only thing I have ever done with NetBUI is uninstall it, so I will leave this for someone else to comment on.

Well, so far I've tried enabling NetBIOS over TCP/IP, as suggested by napoleon41. It was not previously enabled -the radio button next to 'Default - use NetBIOS setting from the DHCP server' was selected. Changing it to 'Enable NetBIOS over TCP/IP' doesn't seem to have made a difference, however. The printer doesn't currently have its own address. Right now it's connected to my computer and the other machines are sharing it from there. There is a spare network jack near it, and it could have its own IP if that would solve anything, although right now I don't see that it would.

Although NetBeui worked very reliably for us with W98SE and W2K, Microsoft doesn't support it for XP, and I had read some pretty discouraging things about trying to use it with XP. But a few weeks ago I did, with trepidation, try installing it to one machine -- no help.

I think I followed all (ok, well, most) of the good info from ccceqo2. Thanks -- it does help me understand the situation better, although I'm still not sure where to go from here....

Now that we have decided not to waste time pursuing ancient stuff like NetBUI, you will need to sort out the architecture of your network.
It seems that you are having problems sharing all resources, not just printers. You would like all PCs to share all the available bandwidth, the printer, the conent filter etc... When your network is sorted out these problems will be sorted out too.

First of all, are you happy for ALL of these PCs to be able to browse each other or would you like to try and seperate some? eg they might have staff documents on them that you want to try and secure and keep seperate from public access PCs.

We need some details about the network hardware and software available.
What is this N2H2 filter? Is it located in your building or is it some offsite service? How do you configure PCs to use it?
Do you have access to the gateways providing internet access?
What kind of devices are the gateways, brands and models would help.

What I am thinking is that you need a setup that will load balance the two internet connections and allow you to run one private address network in your building. Once we find out some details we can figure out the best way to do this.

I would like to help you get this working reliably and and as simply as possible, avoiding bodges that involve manually doing this and that to each PC. Since you say that you are running most of this yourself, I think it will be very worthwhile when you start adding in additional PCs.

Thanks so much, ccceqo2. It's quite possible, though, that we're back to my 'too hopeless to be helped' position. But I'm going to try to answer the questions as best I can.  

Having some of the computers not able to browse others is definitely a good thing -- right now they can all see each other, but most aren't set up to actually share files. They do, however, all need to see the laser printer, which is attached to my computer -- which is obviously a staff machine.  I could possibly intall it on a different machine, as long as my computer could still reach it, though.

The filter is a fairly common library content filter, marketed by a company called N2H2 -- specifically their product named BESS. The filter server is actually running off site, at the county library that is also providing the (now slow) Internet access. It's a proxy filter, set up at their end, and to set our machines up to use it I have to set it to use that proxy server in that computer's LAN settings (in Internet Explorer, Tools, Internet Options, Connections, LAN settings.) In addition, in order to access that proxy server the machine needs to be set to get its Internet access though the county library, ie, using County library IP settings.

The gateways .... hmmm....we're getting past my very shallow depth. We have a router here, on-site, that someone from the County came in once, years ago, and set up so that it would allow us to be able to choose to use one of 2 different sources for our Internet connectivity, one the County Library, and the other the County College, depending on which TCP/IP settings we use for that machine. It's worked well till now, even with the W2K Pro machines, until we got the new WXP comps. When we got the new computers recently, and realized that with XP even machines that didn't need to reach the filter were going to have to use county IP's if they wanted to share the printer, we realized weren't going to have enough IP addresses to do it with. So I spoke to the individual who had set this up years ago, who is, unfortunately, under no obligation at all to help us with this. He said he couldn't give us more IP address in that range, and at the time I thought he meant he couldn't spare any. Your information seems to mean, however, that that range, 210-222 was intrinsically limited. As I said, he doesn't work for us -- there's unfortunately a very clear distinction around here between county and municipal facilities, and the county is very clear about not being required to provide anything other than the actual connectivity -- no technical support, etc. Out of the goodness of his heart, though, he did something else, don't ask me what because he didn't try to explain it much, that allowed us to do what it sounds like you were talking about in your first posting to me, regarding 'private networks' -- using one address to provide Internet browsing for many computers. He said he'd made a quick change, and to start assigning the additional machines that we wanted to use the County's services IP's in the range of 192.168.134.2  through way-up-there, use the gateway address of 192.168.134.1, subnet mask 255.255.255.0, and DNS entries 209.66.0.10 & 209.9.0.12. (That's 192.168.134, incidentally, not .34, like the other, College, range) He also said we should, as time permitted, switch the old machines still using the County to IP's in this range as well. So we could now get more than the previous 13 machines to reach the County. But that's where we ran into the brick wall -- we have enough IP's now, but the issue was really that they're just not providing enough bandwidth to allow that many machines to simultaneously browse the Internet at reasonable speeds, so downloads on machines in that range have slowed down to the point that at peak periods we've basically ground to a halt. There's no chance they'll be providing more bandwidth, I'm told. I didn't get into the issue with the 192.168.134.1 range in my previous posting because I thought it would just complicate my already complicated explanation of the situation.

I don't know how to access the router, change settings in it, whatever -- all I basically do is plug stuff into it, or into switches that I've connected to it. If I really needed to, I do have a username and password that would get me in, theoretically, although I have no idea how, or I could maybe get the fellow at the County to do it if it was something that wouldn't take him much time and effort, since he's made it clear he can't really do work for us. The other IP range, the private network as you explained it, is from the College, and I don't know anything else about it except that our router is somehow set up to optinally reach it, instead of the County Library, via some type of splitting arrangement. Their bandwidth is much, much better, but no filter is available to machines using it. Sorry to be so longwinded -- I'm really not sure which information is significant. If you think all of this is really just beyond me, which I expect it is, please feel free to say so. Thanks so much for all your effort so far. If you think it's time to quit, I'll give you the points anyway, 'cause you've obviously spent a lot of time trying to help me with what might be a lost cause.

lcran, I'm impressed that you understand as much as you do, so don't be so hard on yourself.  

"and at the time I thought he meant he couldn't spare any. Your information seems to mean, however, that that range, 210-222 was intrinsically limited"

Wow.  It takes most people in school more than a bit of time to figure stuff like that out, and you got it just from a paragraph or two.  

I think, now that you have explained your exact situation, that you are in need of some restructuring and decision making.  As I see it:

1.) You need the content, library filtering so all of the kiddies can't surf porn on the net, but, the library's Internet connection is extremely slow and you are limited by the amount of public address that you have.
2.) The college's connection is much faster and has enough speed for many more computers, however, there is no filtering, and those computers don't seem to be able to see the printer on the other side.

Recommendations:
1.) Get a spare printer for the college address to tide you by until you figure things out.  See if you can borrow one from the college. . . . I know libraries are usually very tight on money.

2.) You are kind of stuck in a hard place with the filtering issue.  Basically, the libary needs to decide to either a.) limit the amount of computers which are available for Internet use, or b.) put in some hardware.  You really just need a server on-site that can do your filtering and then send on the approved trafic to the net through your router (also called a gateway).  That way, you can use the fastest speed along with the filtering.  This will also allow you to add as many computers as your bandwidth allows.  If, in the future, if the library decides to purchase it's own connection, this would be fairly easy to tie in.

3.) I would not start rooting around in the router if I were you.  Things are working now, but if you accidentally take the Internet down, you are going to be forced to make choices faster than you might like.  A router that can load-balance between 2 connections is not a simple, home-user router, and you might just find yourself looking at a bunch of very technical stuff.

4.) Overall, I recommend getting everyone on the same, PRIVATE network.  This will eliminate all of your sharing issues, and will give you some safety for your computers.  If the router is already doing the load-balancing as it sounds, all you are looking at purchasing is 1 machine to be the proxy server.  For a network or 30 computers or so, it does not need to be an actual server machine; just a current desktop with a good amount of memory in it (1GB).  Find a filtering program that will do what you need (I have used SurfControl and really like it), and install it on that machine.  Since all of the other computers will connect through the server to get to the content-safe Internet, all of the client computers can be set for DHCP (that way you can save yourself some addressing headaches).

5.) From what you are telling us, all of this IS beyond your current skillset, and I am mentioning it as a recommendation as you will have some decisions ahead of you.

Please keep firing as many questions as you need to, and good luck.

Napoleon41, your "as I see it' assessment sums my situation up quite succinctly. The 'get a spare printer' recommendation is pretty much where I had arrived myself, and is in the works. I'm going to hopefully be setting that up in the next day or two, if I can get the director to spring for the cost of a new laser toner cartridge for the borrowed one. As you say, that will hopefully at least buy me some time to cope with the rest of this.

Believe me, messing around in the router is the last thing I want to do. I don't know much -- just enough to know I don't belong anywhere near the workings of that thing. :) However, I don't think the router is 'load-balancing' persay, unless by that you mean that by assigning IP's we can control which of our 2 Internet connections that machine uses. But it's not doing any kind of assessment of the load and directing accordingly -- just allowing us to use one router and line to split the load manually. (Maybe that IS load-balancing, depending on what that mean, though.) Moot point, though -- trust me, I'm not going in there without a gun to my head.

The idea of filtering on-site is, of course, very appealing, and all along has seemed the obvious answer. But the whole reason this was set up this way was because of the tremendous expense of commercial filters like this. I'm told it's thousands a year for the required licensing, which we don't come close to having. (If you happen to know otherwise, I'd be thrilled to look into it!) The state set up this 'hub' library setup within the counties, providing access and filters, mostly for that reason. I do hear, though, that the funding for that system is headed for extinction within the year, and what we'll do at that point remains to be seen.  

Even though we probably can't afford to purchase multiple, commercial licensing for an on-site filter, I'm still very interested in what you said about not necessarily needing a machine built as a server to act as one, in our situation. The expected cost of the server is one of the reasons we've never gone that route (another is that I'm what passes for tech support here, so we obviously don't have anyone knowledgeable enough to set up & administer the network we would create.) With the grant we recently won, though, I do have a machine that might do, from what you said. It's a new Gateway E6100 with Pentium4 3.0 Ghz/800MHz processor and 1024 MB of memory. Hardly a server, I know, but it sounds like maybe I could use it for one, from what you said.  If I could solve some of our problems by trying to go that route....

For now, I'm going to set up another laser printer, so I have one for all the machines that use the County (and its filter), and another for the others. At least that way I can continue to distribute the load and use the bandwidth I've got available. Maybe NetBeui was ancient, but right about now I'm remembering it fondly :)

Basically, the 3GB machines of today out perform some of the older servers that are running under a much heavier workload that webfiltering would take.  It's just not that much work for 15-30 clients.  So, yes, you could use just a normal machine (you would have to add a network cart--1 in and 1 out) for the web server.  

The software is pretty expensive, however.  It's like you said, usually a couple thousand dollars a year, depending.  You are actually paying for the updates and the database, just like virus scanners like Norton.  Since porn sites are constantly being created, you need a company who has a current database of all their sites.  

There is another option, and a somewhat cheaper option of putting software on each client.  This will be more work for you, but it may fly under the "bar" for the accountants.  LOL.  There are actually some pretty good ones out there that you should take a look at.  Here are the things that you want:
1.) Must be secure from the users and work with all operating system (if they can hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and shut it down, it's really not going to work for you).
2.) It should update with the company just like a virus scanner.  There is really no substitue for real people finding real sites and then adding them to your filter listing.  
3.) It should also filter pages/newsgroups/etc. . . with filters that dynamically add them to a listing.
4.) It should have some way to override it or add pages to a "white list" as mistakes can be made, and that just irritates the users.

Here is a good one to get you started
http://www.cyberpatrol.com/

but you can find them by searching for (+ indicates that the results must include the word)
+web +filtering +content
or
+internet +content +filtering

Parental control is probably not the exact category you are looking for as it usually involves creating profiles for individuals.  This would alow a parent to set certain rules for each child, which is WAY too much work for what you are wanting.

Obviously, I'd have to give it (and probably others) a trial spin, which I haven't had a chance to do you. But after looking at CyberPatrol's pricing for multiple workstation subscriptions in the quantity range we're talking about  -- 12 would do for all the computers we absolutely MUST filter --  I'm thinking that going that route may be a very interesting alternative. It would be $384 for a 12-workstation subscription for 1 year, or $576 for 2 years. Although that's WAY under the prices we've seen for library content filters it's still, believe it or not, a really imposing figure for our budget. But as you said, it may just barely fly under the bar of the accountant (or, since we can't afford one of those, either, our penny-wise library director.) The appeal of breaking our reliance on the County for this service might make it very tempting. I don't mind the additional work of administering it from each individual client -- because of the way this place is networked, I'm unfotunately used to handling other things that way, so I suppose why not another? I can certainly look for others online; I really hadn't tried because I had accepted the library 'party line' that they always run thousands of dollars, are cost-prohibitive for small/poor libraries, yadda-yadda-yadda .....  Thanks!

No problem.  Glad I could help, and good luck with this issue (and your penny-pinching director).  Ha!

Good luck getting all of this sorted out in the future. Having been through all this, there is something you could try with your printer now.

It is possible to put a workstation (like the one with the printer attached) on two networks at once. It has to be windows 2000 or XP and from the properties of TCP/IP click on advanced. There is now an add button so you can add an address from the second network. The PC should now be visible to both networks. The default gateway will determine where the PC gets its internet access from. You might have to play around with which gateway you use and what order the ip addresses are listed in, but it should theoretically work.

Incedentally, this should give you some idea how a router works, it would be like this PC but it would also relay messages between the two networks as required for all the connected PCs.

cya

1.) To both Napoleon41 and ccceqo2 -- thanks you so much!
2.) ccceqo2 -- Your 'two networks at once' suggestion is tantalizing. I did as you said, and on the workstation where the printer is installed, added an IP from the network that is currently unable to reach the printer, leaving the default gateway set to the other network. However, it seems to have had no effect -- that is, the machine still reaches the internet, and the machines in its default network can still reach it, but the other network's machines still don't see it, and it still doesn't see those machines. Am I missing something....? I'm sorry to be such a persistent pill, but if it would work it would really be a huge help!

By a weird little coincidence, what should be sitting next to me on the desk as I read your last post but .... an old, spare network card. A sign? :) Last night I was getting ready to finally toss a dead cpu that I've been picking selected parts out of like a vulture for quite a while now.  But there was still a (so far as I know) working network card left in there, so I popped it out before discarding the carcass. The machine was 7 1/2 years old, and I think I bought and installed that card about a year later, so it probably dates back to 1998. Any chance that a network card that old would work in a new machine?  Or maybe the question is whether updated drivers will be available.... Can't hurt to try, I guess, unless the process might somehow confuse the network card already working in there...? For what it's worth, it's a 3Com Fast EtherLink XL PCI 10/100 Base-TX Ethernet Adaptor. I have the disks that came with it (if there's one thing a librarian can do it's save stuff and keep it organized -- ok, so that's 2 things.)  I would think that I'd need to download new drivers for it, however, assuming such things exist for hardware that old. I'm not sure if network cards have really changed all that much, though. Of course, if this was actually going to work I'd have no problem with going out and buying a new one - just trying to avoid an expense if it's not going to accomplish anything. Actually, I guess I could just borrow one out of another new machine -- again, as long as I didn't end up confusing the heck out of my computer. If I set a system restore point first, maybe....  I'll do it probably Sunday when we're closed -- can't take my machine offline when we're open, or people can print. I'll let you know what happens. Thanks!

Yes ccceqo2, that's the idea.  LOL

Hallelujah and glory be!!!! Before I stuck the second network card in my computer, I tried cccceqo2's idea of browsing to my comp using it's IP address, but no luck. So I went ahead and installed the network card. Apparently the drivers got installed silently -- I didn't even see the 'new hardware detected' type of message that I expected. Plugging the extra card into a network jack and assigning that connection an IP and subnet mask on the other network made the listed Local Area Connection immediately display in my Network Connections as 'connected and firewalled.' (Being a network idiot, I would have assigned that one the default gateway for the network that the IP address goes with, but didn't because ccceqo2 mentioned not to.) That computer still browsed the Internet fine, reach its own printer and be reached by the machines that could already reach it, but still wasn't allowing the other network to print to it. I hadn't been instructed to reboot when I added the IP address, etc., so I did it anyway and ... voila! This is exactly what I had been trying to accomplish, and beating my head against a wall with for the last few weeks! I can't thank you guys enough. Since both napoleon41 and ccceqo2 contributed to the solution (and to my still-pathetic-but-improving understanding of how this networking stuff works), I think the fair thing is to split the points between the two of you. Actually, I wish there was a way to give you both the full points -- they certainly can't be worth as much as all the time you each took to help me! Thanks again!!

Glad to help, and I hope that all of the additional advice about what to do in the future pays off as well.  I'm a bit surprised you gave credit for an "echo answer," but figured your just happy to finally have this ordeal solved.

Congratulations!

Sorry, napoleon41 -- I guess it was in part because ccceqo2's comments, especially the one back on 10/15 which contained that explanation about public and private networks, helped me understand a lot about what was going on here. Even if those comments turned out not to contain the specific answer to the specific problem, I figured I certainly benefited by ccceqo2's contributions. However, I do appreciate your point -- you WERE the one who originated the specific suggestion that ended up solving my question. If you know of a way forme to arrange it, I'll be glad to credit another 250 points to you -- the last thing I would want is for you to think I didn't appreciate all your help!

I'm not worried about points. I've already got enough for a free subscription to this thing.
Nice helping someone who wanted to listen and THINK :)

No, lol, I was just having an irritating day in all aspects.  We have an amazingly worthless guy on the I.T. staff where I work, and I had just gotten off work with him and his petty behavior.  After that, I was just a bit sour.

Nice to know your reasoning, though; this has certainly been a large group effort, though, and like I said, I'm just glad that we all threw in to find a solution for you.  There have been a lot of idea tossed out, and that is the purpose of this site.  So, congratulations, again.

Thanks all!!! :)