RV016 and CIDR? or replacement?

[wbtadmin1]

Good morning. I am looking at restructuring our small business network. I would like to achieve this by essentially creating contiguous subnets such as those in a 192.168.1.0/20 or 192.168.1.0/21 network. These would allow me to structure devices on 192.168.1.0, 192.168.2.0, 192.168.3.0 and so on while allowing these devices to still talk/communicate to each other, this is essential.

One problem/concern I am running into or looking at is in the RV016  setup tab/network for the LAN setting you can enter the device (router) ip address, and then select the SNM from a pull down menu, however the only SNM's available are predetermined 255.255.255 class C 0,128,192,224,240,248, and 252 masks where I am looking to create a classless system for aggregation.

Now I know also in setup I can add multiple subnets, I have tried experimenting with this, but what seems to be happening is windows/pc machines ,when on an additional subnet that has been added to the router, can ping devices in the building, but cannot see/talk to those devices. For example, windows pc 192.168.2.3 can ping 192.168.1.36 but cannot talk to 192.168.1.36. At least this is what I experienced with a quick test yesterday.

Is there a way to use CIDR with the RV016? Can this be achieved perhaps through advanced routing in the setup section? I already manually assign addresses to all of the devices within the company/organization so everyone has a static ip even though DHCP is running. If this can be done with advanced routing, what would the Destination IP be? If this can't be done this way, is there another way to achieve this with either a different device or more devices? I am new to subnetting but have been reading up on it and did a Cisco workbook and a little research on the net so I have a decent understand of addressing in regards to subnetting. CIDR is slightly confusing but seems to be the solution that I am looking for. Thank you for your help!

[David Hornstein]

Hi XL4SBTech

You are suggesting that devices in different subnets can communicate via ICMP but not maybe  TCP ...yeah i'm a bit perplexed by that, but it also interesting to understand what you mean by "see". 

Are you trying netbios between subnets ?

Are you sure it's not a private firewall on the PC's that is interfering with this communications?

You mention "CIDR is slightly confusing", so I have attached a freeware subnet calculator for your referernce.  It's old but freeware. 

regards Dave

[wbtadmin1]

Thank you for the response! Hopefully I can give more information and answer your questions effectively here.

As far as when I said they can't "see" each other, I mean for example, when I go to windows network places, all of the shared volumes that we have on the network don't show up, even though I can ping the devices through command prompt. We have a cross platform environment, mac/pc, so from the mac end I get similar results, if I go to shared/all, the windows device I can normally mount as a shared volume no longer shows up. However, I can go/connect to server, and manually connect via protocol and ip address from the mac to the pc. So it is like I can ping these devices on the network, they are verifying to me they can communicate to each other, but they do not show up in the shared network areas like they normally do.

Are you trying netbios between subnets ? 

Honestly I don't know about netbios, I've heard the term many times, just haven't had to set or adjust in my experience. Essentially the way our network is used is basically file sharing/writing. Most of our data is transferred for large format output devices so users may take a final file and write a postscript from their mac to a pc server.

Are you sure it's not a private firewall on the PC's that is interfering with this communications?

I don't think so, being that everything is working fine prior to changing the ip/subnet on the device.

So yeah I guess in my head what I want to do sounds fairly simple to me. Have different CIDR subnets 192.168.1.0, 192.168.2.0 etc etc, and allowing them to be able to file share to each other, webcams be able to be accessed, wireless devices to be able to communicate to other subnets etc. I appreciate the help!

-X

[David Hornstein]

Hi X

what about trying to use "Map network drive"

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308582