SmallNetBuilder

Setup - Adding a Computer to the Network

Having had good luck thus far, I plugged a Lindows OS Linux machine into one of the unused 10/100 Ethernet ports on the front of the unit. Right before this, the Lindows box had been happily working away on another network and already had a dynamic IP address for that network. To my pleasant surprise, as soon as I plugged the Lindows box into the Linksys it dynamically picked up the new address given to it by the Linksys from its DHCP pool of address (Figure 3). Seconds later I was browsing the Internet with no configuration changes. Who said Linux has to be hard?

Figure 3: DHCP Server controls

Because I already have network devices assigned to the range of 10.0.0.x I decided to change the Ethernet address of the Linksys gateway. This would allow those devices to make use of the Linksys as the gateway to the Internet without having to change each device I already have on the network to a 192.168 address. Figure 4 shows that the DHCP auto-magically obliges and sets the range for DHCP leases to match the range I am using for the device itself.

Figure 4: DHCP range follows base address change

The problem is that the subnet mask does not match 255.0.0.0, which is the subnet on the rest of my devices already assigned to the 10.0.0.x network. The Linksys insists on assigning a subnet mask that starts with 255.255.255.x (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Subnet mask set to 255.255.255.0

To fix this problem with the subnet mask I would need to be able to change the subnet mask on the Linksys router. However the Linksys provides only a drop-down box with pre-set subnet masks (Figure 6). There is no way to type in the proper subnet mask, such as 255.0.0.0, to go with a 10.0.0.1 device IP. I hope Linksys will understand that while having pre-filled subnet masks is good for most users, many users will want to be able to set their own subnet mask - and should be allowed to do so.

Figure 6: Preset subnet masks