New ISDN configuration for internet

Hello everybody,

I want to take a ISDN (56 Kbps) connection for internet. I have 4 pc which are connected through a HUB.

can nybody give the detail hardware setup and configuration (with diagram)for this......

Thanking you

SAMIR

 

You need to connect the ISDN to your LAN of 4 PCs

There are differing ways of doing this depending on what you want to spend and what you currently have in terms of hardware and software

Internet sharing is one possibility - certainly the cheapest but is a real kludge under anything other than XP and somewhat unreliable under just about every circumstance

An ISDN router is much more reliable but will add cost and needs a bit more thought on setup

The biggest inherent problem with ISDN on a LAN is that PCs have a nasty habit of throwing out requests for all kinds of information which, if no carefully locked down, can cause your ISDN to be up for a frighteningly large percentage of time during the day. If you can get a fixed rate for all surfing on your ISDN then I'd STRONGLY reccomend you do so

Post some more info on what you currently have and we'll try to narrow things down a little

 

Wow I hadn't seen an ISDN in years. I didn't know they were still being used.

 

Still very popular with people who cant have DSL/Cable and cant afford leased line / frame etc

At least, thats the case in the UK !

 

Thank You Very much .....AndyO.... for your reply....but i want the detail hardware setup and configuration (with diagram). So can you gime me the same.....


Waiting for your reply....


SAMIR

 

Samir, if you really have ISDN, it will normally give you two channels, B1 and B2. Each channel can support 64kbps. Each channel comes with a unique telephone number. Most people bond the two channels to get 128kbps. (Unless you want to use one channel for voice- then you just keep the other channel for 64kbps data.)
You will need an ISDN ROUTER with Terminal Adapter. That will connect from your ISDN phone line to your hub. The WAN side of the router goes to the phone line; the LAN side goes to the UPLINK jack on the hub. That's it, for hardware.
Setting up the ISDN router requires some tedium. Be sure your telephone company gives you all the correct settings and buy a router with good instructions and support! HTH.

 

The other thing to consider with adding a router is IP addressing and how the router appears on your network. You will need to give the router an internal IP address on your network. Usually this is put at one end of your subnet (personally I tend to go high - 254).

So if your network has 5 machines on 10.0.0.1 to 10.0.0.5, you could put the router on at 10.0.0.254 (all have to have the same subnet mask - again my personal preference would be for 255.255.0.0). You then need to set the router's internal address as the defualt gateway on all the PCs.

Similarly, if you were using 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.5 (255.255.255.0) for you internal network, then you could use 192.168.0.254 for the router.

Most modern routers will include a DHCP server that will automatically assign IP addresses. However, this can cause problem if adding it to an existing network, so it is worth understanding how the addressing system works.

Don't forget DNS! without it your PC won't be able to browse the internet. How you set this up depends on the network. The simplest way is to enter your ISP's DNS IP address on all your machines, but this also tends to generate a lot of traffic, and could be problematic if you have a Win2k+ server. Many modern routers have a DNS forwarding service, that allows you to point DNS at the router but this doesn't avoid issues with a Active directory server (where you would be better off routing DNS via the server).

I can't agree more with AndyO's comment about getting a fixed rate for the ISDN line. It is very difficult to control an ISDN router dial up, and the bills can escalate very quickly. It can be cheaper to get a leased line than run a "busy" ISDN line. I used to calculate that in the UK it was cheaper to get a leased line than use dial up ISDN if your connection was open more than 3 to 4 hours a day. That changed with fixed rate, but if you can't get fixed rate in your area, dial up charges could be significant. Also note that using both lines (to get 128Mb) doubles the dial-up cost!

 

Why not stay with 255.255.255.0 with that few machines or maybe 255.255.252.0 if you expect to have a larger network at some point or even 255.255.248.0 if you expect to have a much larger network?

 

Ah! a discussion on IP addresses. Splendid!

I think 10.0.0.0 is the obvious IP address space for any internal network as it gives you so much freedom (and it's easy to remember).

If you use 10 as the first octet you are free to use pretty much any subnet mask you want as long as the first octet of the mask is 255. So why limit yourself to only 254 internal addresses when you could have many more.

If you use a partial mask (my terminology - one that is not all zeros [0] or ones [255]), you're making life difficult for yourself trying to work out if 10.0.0.10/255.255.248.0 is in the same network as 10.0.9.11/255.255.248.0. (it's not). You'll find yourself grabbing you calculator every five minutes.

I recommend 255.255.0.0 because it gives you a good balance of networks to nodes.

With 10.0.0.0/255.255.0.0 you can:

1. Simply identify each local network using the second octet. Use 10.0.0.0 for head office, 10.1.0.0 for first branch, 10.2.0.0 for second branch.

2. Use the third octet to group node types. Say printers on 10, Servers on 100, routers on 255, users on 0-9.

If you do that you can immediately identify a device type by the IP address. For example, you could tell than 10.4.10.55, was a printer in branch office 4.

That sort of flexibility and ease of use isn't available with 10.0.0.0/255.255.255.0 or 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0.

 

Absolutely agree.

But. (always a 'but' in there, isn't there )

In some circumstances a PCs network performance can slow down a bit from checking for the possible existance of 65,000 other machines.

Granted, the slowdown isn't usually huge but if you don't need the room, why mess with it?

 

I'm a lazy guy. Give me easy over peak performance any day.

 

Hang on a minute! I've had a moment to think and I'm going to stick my neck out here:

When is a system going to check for the possible existance of 65,000 machines! A node will either connect to another directly because it knows it's address, or it will broadcast. It will wait the same amount of time for a response on a 65000 node subnet as it will on a 254 node network.

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