Networking question

[Dave W]

My home network, such as it is, consists of an old computer and a phone plugged into a wired VoIP router.

I'm about to set up my first wireless connection for my new computer. I think I understand the procedure for getting the router to recognize the wireless card, etc. But the two existing devices don't have wireless cards and will just be plugged into the ethernet ports of the new wireless router. I don't see anything in the instructions about setting them up.

Once the modem and new router communicate, should the ethernet devices follow automatically, or should I expect to have to do something else?

[Darrol]

The router should automatically communicate with the devices connected through ethernet. When I set up the wireless router to get my mothers computer high speed internet, all I had to do was connect with a computer connected via ethernet and configure the settings. After that it was just connecting to the network with the computer that I installed a wireless card into. It was a really simple process.

[Rhythm N. Bliss]

Simple for a young lad, hard for us oldtimers!

My guitar player is my tech & he's outa town. >shrugs<

[chromium]

Yeah - you should just be able to plug in the wired network ports and go to town.  The ports on most of those routers are just hard-set to autonegotiate with whatever computers you plug into them.

The one thing you might need to check is that the network card on your old computer is set to autonegotiate its speed and duplex.  You can adjust that in control panel/networking/[properties-of-your-specific-network-card] usually.  If there is a mismatch on this setting between the pc and the router, it will manifest by either being dog slow or not working at all.

[Captcolour]

Probably the same thing that Chromium said, but when I used the router with my older computer, I had to go into the set up of the router to change the MTU setting to 1300 or 1100 for it to work well.  Was really slow at higher settings.  I also disabled the firewall and anti-virus in the router set up itself.  Don't know if that is the best thing to do or not, but did it anyway.  Good luck.

[Dave W]

Thanks, all. Probably one less thing to worry about.

My old computer is already running through the wired Linksys VoIP router and the connection speeds were fine from the start, I never had to adjust settings, so hopefully that's a good sign.

[Lightyear]

Your router acts as the TCP/IP server of your network.  It takes one IP address and "shares" it with the rest of your devices.  You may have to go into network properties on some of the the devices and select "assign address automatically" radio button.  Depends on the operating system of your device.

[Dave W]

Just checked, old computer is set up to automatically detect LAN settings.

[Lightyear]

Then you should be fine.

You can verify that you are talking to your router by using the  "ipconfig" command in DOS - of course if you are hitting the web with the device then this is a redundant act

[Dave W]

Everything went off without a hitch. Even the VoIP router configured itself automatically once I plugged it into the new router. Wireless is working on the new computer, let's just hope that I can maintain a good connection.

Thanks, guys.