Increasing my available ethernet ports
swilkins
Newbie

I have a Westell 9100 em but need more LAN ports than the available 4 it has. I also have a Netgear wireless router, can I use this router to increase my available ethernet connections. I don't want to use the available wireless option because it drops out too often.

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Re: Increasing my available ethernet ports
smith6612
Community Leader
Community Leader
You can increase the Ethernet port count by adding unmanaged switches to the Westell, and of course you can add more by using the Netgear. With the Netgear if you use it as a switch, all you would really need to do is disable DHCP, Firewall, NAT, UPnP, etc on the Netgear itself to dumb it down, and then plug in an Ethernet cable into one of the four LAN ports (do not connect an Ethernet cable from the Westell into the Netgear's Internet port). If you're crafty though and the Netgear supports static routes, you could probably use all four Ethernet ports along with the Internet port as your "uplink" port. It's a crude way of doing it, but it should work just fine.
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Re: Increasing my available ethernet ports
swilkins
Newbie

"plug in an Ethernet cable into one of the four LAN ports (do not connect an Ethernet cable from the Westell into the Netgear's Internet port)."

You say not to connect an ethernet cable from the Westel to the Netgears internet port. Then do I use one of the LAN ports for the Westel connection to the Netgear router?

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Re: Increasing my available ethernet ports
smith6612
Community Leader
Community Leader
I believe I might have phrased that wrong. What I meant there was to connect an Ethernet cable from one of the Westell's LAN ports to one of the Netgear's LAN ports. Basically, LAN to LAN.
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Re: Increasing my available ethernet ports
viafax999
Community Leader
Community Leader

You can also connect one of the Westell LAN ports to the WAN port of the Netgear which will create you a second internal subnet.  If you use this option configure the netgear to use a different subnet other than 192.168.1 that is being used by the Westell - do this by connecting a machine to one of the LAN ports of the negtgear and run the admin pages to configure.

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Re: Increasing my available ethernet ports
prisaz
Legend

I have a couple of old routers where DHCP has been disabled. Also make sure the router lan port address does not conflict with anything else on your lan. 1 LAN in and 3 LAN out. What you get is a 4 port switch. I would not use the WAN port for anything.

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Re: Increasing my available ethernet ports
dslr595148
Community Leader
Community Leader

@prisaz wrote:

I would not use the WAN port for anything.


I am just wondering..

Please tell me why do you suggest that.

Thanks.

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