Internal Network Configuration

OK, now it's time to get your internal network talking to router and this begins with the first workstation you connected to the router. We're assuming for this excercise that you have not configured any network addressing on your internal devices and will be using DHCP on your internal network as well as your external. The beauty of using DHCP is that you don't have to worry about many of the issues associated with manual network addressing such as having a duplicate IP address between two devices. Having two devices with the same IP address will cause a networking conflict and the second device to access the network will not be able to communicate with the rest of the network, DHCP solves this problem and makes setting up your network an easy task.

Now here's where things get just a little bit tricky as we cannot anticipate how each router is initially configured by the manufacture, if you are using a router other than the NETGEAR WNDR3700 you should find a quick start guide in the documentation that will take you through the configuration product for your application. However, we will continue walking through the process on the WNDR3700 which will be similiar on most routers.

With your workstation connected to the router you will need to connect to the router with a web browser to access the configuration interface. For the WNDR3700 one would enter http://www.routerlogin.com into the web browsers address block and press enter which brings you to the login screen. You then enter admin for the user name and the default password of password into the password field and click the OK button which should then log you in to the router for configuration. If your router behaves like ours it will likely take you first to the Firmware Upgrade Assistant. We really like this feature in that manufaturers are always updating the code on thier devices to increase stability, enhance features, and fix any discovered issues. If the assistant shows that there is a newer version available it is certainly worth the time to let the router download and update the system.

Following any updates we're now ready to begin with our configuration. The first thing we should probably do is change the access password from so we'll go to the menu on the left and scroll down until we see the Maintenace lable and select the Set Password link to display the password change form. Enter password into the old password field, then enter a new password into the Set password and Repeat New password fields and click the Apply button. You may be asked to login again with your new password so enter Admin into the user field and your new password into the password field and click the OK button.

With our router now secured with a better password, let's go configure our basic network and DHCP settings for internal network. Scroll down the menu on the left until you see the Advanced menu header then click on LAN Setup menu option below it. In the main screen area you should see the following:

Device Name: default setting WNDR3700 - you can call the device anything you like.

IP Address: This address becomes the default gateway address for all of your internal devices. Most network practitioners will either use the first or last IP address in the network pool as thier default IP address. In building a small network one will want to choose an IP range that they know will be available for thier use and that will not interfer with any Internet connectivity. To ensure you configure the right network address range we recommend you use the 192.168.0.1-254 IP range for your LAN environment. This Class C IP range is special in that it is designated as a private network space for LAN builders to use for private purposes. Our practice at pcNetworking is to always set the routers internal address to the last available IP in the range which is 192.168.0.254. You could use another address if you desire, but using the last address as the gateway and the beginning addresses for your devices will ensure you will not have any IP address conflicts.

The next fields to enter is the IP Subnet Mask entry, this should be 255.255.255.0 to allow for the use of the full 254 addresses within the network. We'll leave the RIP Direction and RIP Version set to thier defaults for now.

Next, we configure our internal DHCP settings. You have a couple of choices you can use in setting up your intenal IP addressing scheme. You could by default use the entire remaining range of IP addresses 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.253 for DHCP or a smaller range if you wanted to have a reserve range of addresses for another reason. For example, in our test network, we setup 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.100 for our DHCP range so we could reserve the 192.168.0.101-192.168.0.253 range for devices that might require a manually configured IP address. In our case we have a network connected printer, Windows Home Media server for sharing multimedia files like music and videos, and a couple of test servers we're always beating up on that we wanted to have assigned IPs for. This makes them easier to find and manage on the network when we need to and this would be equally important if ever wanted to open firewall rules to a specific device. The choice is entirely based upon your needs and you can come back in at any time and make adjustments as your needs evolve. For the purposes of this exercise, we will use the test network scenario above. Make sure Use Router as DHCP Server is checked and enter 192.168.0.1 as the Starting IP Address and 192.168.0.100 as the Ending IP Address.

STOP!!!!!

Before going any further read this first. Once we commit the changes to the device you may loose connectivity with it. This is normal as you have changed the network address range of your LAN and the systems need to get into sync again. This is because the workstation must now ask the router for a new IP address to be able to connect. To see if you are connected to the Internet, open a web browser and try and connect to a website. If you connect everything is good then your network is ready to begin sharing with other systems. If after a 3-5 minutes you are still unable to connect, try restarting the computer so that it will renegotiate connectivity with your router.

Assuming all of the above went well and you are now connecting to your network we can begin to discuss configuration of your wireless connectivity. If you are still having issues reset the device according to the documentation and start fresh. Don't get frustrated, these things happen to us too, just repeat the process until you have connectivity. Now let's look at look at configuring wireless networking.