Newbie questions

kejianshi

On the LAN, you can change IP to 10.56.34.1 / 24 or whatever…

Mentioned earlier. But yeah. /24 is good unless you a subnet calculating pro.

Lakz

The DHCP of course… What was I thinking. Everything works smoothly now. Thanks.

My recommendation stands… If you do as I suggested, you probably won't have any problems.

This can also be done from the console, and if you only have 1 LAN type connection, it might even be easier.

10.56.34.1 is just a example - Make it anything you like, but I would make it something equally odd as 10.56.34.1

The reason I do that is to minimize the chances of overlap of subnet IPs when using VPNs.

10.0.0.1 for instance, is little better than 192.168.1.1

That is precisely the reason why I wanted to change the subnet. I'm a pilot (not often home) and plan on using VPNs extensively.

So I did a fair bit of research over the weekend (remember, I'm completely new to networking, bare with me :) ). I'd love to isolate some virtual machines and a guest wireless access from the rest of the network, mostly for security reasons. I'm not sure whether VLANs or DMZs (or both) are the best way to go about it.

For the sake of curiosity and expandability, I seriously consider returning my newly bought switch while I can to get a managed one with more ports.

I know that Cisco is supposed to be the best manufacturer out there. Sadly the only Cisco switch I found within my budget (~$200) only has 10 ports, which I find to be too few. I've been looking around, and I came up with with these :

kejianshi

I've always made pretty good use of 5 seperate NIC ports, but if you need more subnets than you have NIC ports, consider VLANs. Or if you need several subnets carried on one set of switches all over a spread out area, VLANs work great.

I didn't actually need VLANs at all in any of my applications, but if I didn't have tons of free NIC ports, I would.

biggsy

@Lakz:

I assume Open-VM-Tools-8.8.1 is the one, but I just want to double check.

Definitely use:

Open-VM-Tools Stable 8.7.0.3046 (build-425873) platform: 2.0

You may well find that 8.8.1 won't start.

stephenw10

I would say that you don't need VLANs. You already have several spare ports that you bridged together so the only other reason you might want them is to segregate sections of your network that span switches, you haven't mentioned anything like that.
If you need (or want ;)) a managed switch then define what features you need on it. The low end HP switches always get a good write up here as do the Netgear managed switches, the GS108T for example.

Steve