Can RVS4000 be used to bridge subnets?

[jpleslie01]

At the small church I attend, and where I'm the IT guy, we have an RVS4000 router which has worked well for us including the VPN capability. Our internet connection is through AT&T (not my choice) and last week we had to switch from DSL to U-Verse because AT&T is doing away with the former.

Unfortunately as part of this switch, the old modem was discarded and an NVG510 installed. The NVG510 is a combo modem/router. But since it doesn't have VPN capability and is not as good a router all around as the RVS4000 (even though the 4000 is an aging device), I am trying to run both.

I finally figured out how to set up IP Passthrough on the NVG510 so now VPN is again working to the RVS4000 so that's not an issue. We do have a couple of PCs that are in a room where no wired connections are possible so they are using wireless. But they are not very close to the wireless antennas so they don't have the greatest throughput. The NVG510 does have wireless capability and is physically located to where it would provide a much better signal. However, the NVG510 will only use a 192.168.x.x subnet and our LAN is setup for 10.x.x.x. I'm not about to change the LAN as it runs a Windows domain with enough equipment that I don't want the exercise of changing subnets.

So my question is this. Can the RVS4000 be setup so that it will route domain traffic between the 2 subnets? As it is now, connecting a PC to the 192.168.x.x subnet on the NVG510 allows it to have internet access but it can't access domain resources on the 10.x.x.x subnet. I don't understand networking well enough to know why this won't work. I know it can because when I worked for a large corporation, they had different subnets that were routed so that PCs on one subnet could be on the same Windows domain as PCs on another subnet and all access resources on both subnets.

The RVS4000 may be capable of doing this but my limited knowledge of networking (I know servers, not switches, etc) means I'm not sure of what I see on the router to know if it can do it or not.

I'd be appreciative to know first off if the RVS4000 can do it, and secondly if it can, then how to set it up. I've worked with the RVS4000 since we got it 3+ years ago so I'm fairly familiar with it, I just don't know the rest.

Jonathan

[Tom Watts]

Hi JP, some of the issues you're running in to include NAT and the Firewall of the RVS4000. You may be able to try to set the RVS4000 in to "router mode" and make a static route or use RIP.

The route may look something like-

Destination 192.168.x.0

Mask 255.255.255.0

Gateway  The LAN IP address of the U-VERSE box

Hop count 1

Conversely, the U-VERSE box may also need a similar static route since it has no idea about the 10.x.x.x network, so all traffic may come from the RVS4000 but won't have a path back since the U-VERSE wouldn't know where to send it.

If the U-VERSE supports RIP, this may be a better option since they should share a route table.

Since the RVS4000 is behind the U-VERSE you likely don't need the firewall of the RVS4000. You may want to disable the firewall and IPS, especially for testing purposes.

-Tom
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