Turn Netgear wireless router into dumb hub


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OK I live in an apartment complex which provides broadband internet access to all the tenents. Through some investigation, I've found there's a T1 line running into the building which is distributed to each apartment with a standard Linksys router and a bunch of large switches. I personally have a number of computers, some wireless, behind a Netgear WGR614 wireless G router. I'm getting tired of port-forwarding everything, though, plus there's files on more than one computer that I want my buddies in the other apartments here to access (and with port forwarding, of course, you can only point the port to one of your internal IPs).

So my question is this: how do I set up the Netgear so that it acts like just another switch connected to the main Linksys router? I know then that the Linksys will see all my comps directly, but I have no limit on IPs and that's exactly what I want it to do anyway.

BTW, the back of the Netgear has one WAN and four regular ports -- no uplink port.

Thank you!

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from a quick look at the manual for that model - it does not seem to support bridging. But it states that all ports are auto uplink - or in other words, if you connect your outside connect to one of the 4 lan ports, that should turn it basically into a switch with wireless connections.

Your machines will grab their address from your complex network.

I would read the manual - there was something about it supporting dhcp proxy, etc.. etc..

But from the 2 seconds I spent breezing over the manual - If I understand your question correct, just plug your complex connection into 1 of your 4 ports, and you should be good to go.

edit: I do not recommend you do this - even if your complex is behind a firewall, you will be exposed to all the other machines in your complex. If you want to share files between your buds in the complex - put the files you want to share on 1 machine - and give them secure access to THAT machine only.

Edited by BudMan
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Thanks Budman. I'll give that a shot. Yes, I'm aware of the security concerns, but the Linksys router is only for our building, which is not that large and I know everyone in it--and none of them pose a threat (read: to dumb to find/do anything critical). I have everything password-protected anyway. And this is for more than just file-sharing, otherwise I'd do what you would suggest by putting all the files on one server. If this works, it'll make my life a lot easier. Thank you.

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