Well, it’s been a long wait, but I finally ditched the business class dsl with static IP address for business class fiber with a static IP.  Now, ftp users shouldn’t have to throttle their connection speed so that my connection wouldn’t saturate.  My connection is symetrical, so I have lots of headroom.  The amazing thing is, that the static ADSL was costing me $130/month, and the fiber will only cost me $60/month.  That’s a win.

I had a fairly custom set up.  A Dlink ADSL bridged modem, and a pair of DD-WRT flashed linux based linksys routers.  One was the main router, and the other a wireless bridge.  As usual, the private IP numbers were in the 192.168.1.1 address block.  Everything was under that range, with many IP addresses static.  Servers, security servers, security cameras, printers, Kodi android tv box, etc.  Other items, such as wifi lightbulbs, were handled by the main router’s DHCP server.

So, the installer that showed up was just that: an installer.  He knew very little about networking or anything besides getting the fiber router up and running so that computers, etc could get the internet.  Pretty much okay for a residential customer, but not so much for a business customer.

So, I decided that the easiest way to get everything working was to keep the wifi lights, cameras, camera servers, etc on the linksys infrastructure.  So, I moved the two main publicly accessible servers to the new arris fiber router, and set up the intial port forwards for services.  However, there was something that had to be dealt with first.  The arris router comes set to 192.168.254.254, which won’t talk to the 192.168.1.1 block.

I could have simply changed the netmasks from 255.255.255.0 to 255.255.0.0 making it a class B network.  However, I would prefer having just a class C private network.

So, I changed the arris router to 192.168.1.1, and the main linkys infrastructure router to 192.168.1.3, since 192.168.1.2 was taken by the wireless bridge.  I then hooked that to the arris router just like an extension switch, by connecting the eth ports together.  (Not the linksys WAN port)

I went through the arris configure pages to set it all up, including the SSID and password of the wireless interface.  The only wierd thing is that for a couple laptops (most were fine), they wouldn’t properly pick up the gateway, so connections were borked.  Solved this easily by setting the laptop’s connection to ‘static’ and manually entered in 192.168.1.1 for the gateway and dns.  I really don’t perceive that as a problem, and may be an issue with the arris router.  In a few days, I’ll try to hook a wireless access point to the arris, to see if that fixes it.  I really don’t think I’ll lose much sleep over it.

Moral of this story:  If you are a business class customer of your ISP and you choose an upgrade like this, you better know what you are doing network-wise.  Or, enlist the help of someone like me.  😉