I am trying to help someone who has a small office with DSL.
He originally had his Verizon DSL with a Westell 6100 modem connected to the uplink port on a Linksys WRT54GS wireless router. The four workstations in the office would connect to the router either via cabled or wireless connections. The router acted as the DHCP server. All workstations had connections to the internet through the DSL line, but there was periodic trouble with machines seeing each other.
He decided he wanted to add a server running MS Small Business 2003 server to the network. He wants the server to act as the DHCP server and have all the workstations be able to access shared data and programs from the server.
The server now has 2 network cards. I began by attaching the DSL modem directly to one of the NICs in the server. I tried several IPs, including the one that had previously been assigned to the wireless router, but was not able to get a LAN connection. After speaking with Verizon, they said the MAC address of the Linksys router was set in the modem and the modem had to be connected through the router. Sure enough if I did not change any IPs and connected the modem to the uplink port in the router and connected the server to another router port, I had connectivity. I went through all the configuration screens to find where the MAC address was set or could be changed, but I could not locate it. I reconnected the modem directly to the server and continued to modify IPs until I got a connection, then attempted to connect the server to the uplink port on the router, but even though I had turned off the DHCP on the router that caused me to loose connectivity.
In frustration, I reattached the DSL modem to the uplink port in the router, disabled one of the NICs in the server, reset the router to handle DHCP, and connected the server to the network as a peer device. The workstations are able to log into the domain, but are having trouble accessing network devices - such as the office printer.
Is there a way to connect the DSL line to one of the NICs in the server, connect the 2nd NIC in the server to wireless router and allow the server to act as the DHCP server. The router should simply act as a hub that allows wireless connectivity to the workstations.
What configuration settings do I need to check on the modem? router? server? The router seems to be causing some type of conflict that I have not been able to narrow down.