2960 catalyst and ISP

[BarnesUK]

Hi,

i wonder if someone could help me see if something is possible or not.

i setup a lot of remote offices for our company. we always get blocks of 5 static IPs we assign to our firewall and voice router.

sometimes when the ISP has setup their modem, they only give us one port we can come from. so what we would do is get a small 5 port gig netgear and plug in the isp, then we would attach our other devices to the switch and everything was able to get out to the internet on the statics.

what im having problems with though is, id like to replace the small netgear with one of our 24 port cisco 2960s.

however when i plug in the isp and the other devices, its doesn't work like the netgear. I assumed that the netgear is only layer 2, so I've configured the interfaces im connecting to with "no switchport" this does infact change the light from orange to green on the ISP when i do this. All interfaces are up and up. ive testing making them trunks and access but no luck, however i didn't feel like that was going to be necessary.

im just trying to dumb down a Cisco switch to be a netgear.

would appreciate any things i can test from you all,

Thank you.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Actually your Netgear is likely a small L3 router/switch with NAT/PAT capability.

Unfortunately, your 2960 is an Enterprise level switch, which generally doesn't have NAT/PAT and might not support any L3 routing at all (depends on the particular model and installed software).

So, rather than trying to dumb down your 2960 to the Netgear, what you really likely need is to smarten your 2960 to the Netgear level, which, also unfortunately, might not be possible.

What you might be able to do, though, if you need more LAN ports, is connect a 2960 to a Netgear.