Small Business Networking Goes Virtual

For this step, engineers conceptually laid out exactly what the network would consist of. Depending on usage, number of users and type of devices, the network design can vary in its level of complexity. For this setup, engineers identified four different groups: the broadband connection, the wired network, wireless connectivity and an isolated testing network.

The switch is configured to consider VLAN1 as the default. In the plan, engineers decided to make the internal wired network part of VLAN1. The wireless had the label VLAN3 and the isolated testing network was VLAN4. The port that the broadband, or high-speed, connection would be plugged into was assigned as VLAN2.

With the various groups identified, engineers divided up the ports and assigned them to each group. To allow traffic to pass from one group to the other, or access the Internet, the broadband router had to be connected to a port that was a member of all of the VLANs. Port 1 was set aside to be part of VLAN1, VLAN2, VLAN3 and VLAN4 since that is where router would go. Ports 2 to 7 would also be part of VLAN2, for other sources of broadband. The bulk of the ports, from ports 8 to 36, were allocated for the internal wired network, VLAN1. The wireless VLAN3 had ports 37 to 42. And finally, the design assigned VLAN4, the testing network, to ports 43 to 48.

That ends the planning stage. Now, time to actually deploy the switch.

Step 2: Setup the switch

Engineers plugged a laptop directly into the switch and powered up both the switch and the laptop. Both the Smartwizard Discovery program and the Web browser interface can be used to configure the switch. The Smartwizard Discovery program can find all the switches on the network without using the IP address. The Web browser interface can be accessed from any location via the switch's IP address, supports password protection, and allows more extensive configuration and backup of the settings. The switch has been pre-configured from the manufacturer with a default IP address of 192.168.0.239 and subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.

A static and valid IP address can be manually assigned to the switch using Netgear's SmartWizard Discovery program. For networks with DHCP, the program can "discover" the switch and have the DHCP assign a dynamic address. After the switch has received a new address, clicking on Web Access from the program opens up the browser-based interface.

Engineers manually configured the laptop to be on the switch's default subnet and opened up the Web configuration tool. Changing the machine's subnet is necessary to access the Web configuration tool without using the SmartWizard Discovery program.

The default password is "password."

At this point, a better IP address that fits the rest of the network can be assigned. If a static address has already been assigned, then there's no need to put in a new IP address. For security purposes, engineers changed the password to the Web-based configuration.

NEXT: Creating the VLANs