Its funny, I read the list faithfully, but go months without having
anything to say or ask. And then come three things in a row!
A friend asked for help, and when I looked at his (business) setup I found
the following.
One moderate spec machine, now a few years old and in need of renewal, with
two network cards. One card is DHCP to the one-port router, which goes to
the ADSL connexion, which is fairly lightly used. This is getting an
address in the range 192.168.0.x, as usual.
the other card is set up for static addressing, runs off an independent
hub, and its using the range 172.16.0.1, with a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0.
I was all set to find that there was some huge network behind this, but in
fact all there is is two printers. Yes, this network has one computer and
two printers and appears to be using an internal Class B address for it, if
I understand the situation correctly.
This was set up by a local computer store after apparently a great deal of
head scratching.
Well, I too am scratching my head and trying to figure out could anyone
have a legitimate reason (ie not simply they failed to understand
networking) for doing this. Like, if I really wanted to have the two
printers on a separate net, why not just use a subnet mask of
255.255.255.128 and get two subnets that way? But in any case, why make
life complicated with subnets, why would I not just assign them addresses
in the 192.168.0.x range. What I usually have done in these situations
(but I'm an amateur at this stuff nowadays) is put the printer on a static
address of 192.168.0.100, have the router assign addresses to the computers
in the low numbers, and everyone seems to print just fine. There are only
two printers and one computer here, so what could the problem be?
It seems that the simplest thing to do is take all this stuff out and use a
5 port router/modem, and just make the two printers 101 and 102, why would
this not work?
Is this missing something obvious?
Cheers
Al