P2P networking with a switch.

[jpedersm1]

Hey guys im pretty new here, just started taking my classes for ccna.  The teacher was gone today and want me and another guy make some cables and hook them up.  After I got everything hooked up I tried to ping other workstations but nothing came back, any idea here? 

What he have to work with is 12 PC's  going to drops.  The drops are connected to a splitter thing (Don't know what it is called, but all I do know is that the drops off the wall come here and are split open with each wire connected to a thing on the back).  From this thing we have some cat 5 cables going to a switch (12 to be exact) and on the number 1 port of the switch is going to firewall which has nothing else connected up just the cat 5 cable from the switch and to the firewall.  These two units are Cisco units, but I don't know which ones they are.  From the top thing to the switch we have all the cables connected for the PC's.  Some lights are green and the others are orange?  I can go to some of the machines and do an ipconfig and get back a 192.168.1.? ip address and a Gateway of 192.168.1.6.  When pining I get to the gateway but when I try to ping other machines it does not go through.  Is there something that needs to be figured out on the switch or would we need to have the switch connected to the network. Also for the gateway that it is showing would this be the firewall then?                   

[John Blakley]

Justin,

Switches will pass traffic without any special configuration in most cases. The gateway is going to be your next hop. It could be a firewall, proxy server, l3 switch, etc., but it doesn't have to be the firewall. I'm not going to be much help to you on this one because we know so little about what's going on with your equipment. In general, you boot a switch up, connect your PCs to it, configure your ip addresses on the same subnet and you can ping the other PC. Make sure that your firewall on the PCs aren't on and you should get a reply.

John

[jpedersm1]

If I go in tomorow I will try to unplug the firewall, other then that the switch is the only thing there right now.  We got a new room and trying to help the teacher get everything wired up.  The line going out for the network is not connected yet, but it still is giving us some IP addresses.  Before we hooked the cables up it was our best friend number start with a 169, but when the cables got hooked up they got a 192.168.1.? address.  Will this be a setting in the computer or how would we be getting these address if we are not connected to the network or a DHCP server.  For the Ping I can ping the gateway which I believe is the router, but not other PC's.  I just getting the timed out message back.  I tried this on 5 to 6 computers and the same thing, where I can ping the gateway and not the other machines.

[John Blakley]

Can you ping the gateway from 2 machines in the same switch? If so, check your firewalls on the PC....

[jpedersm1]

Yes we can.  Just a quick question for the firewall we just have a cat 5 cable from the switch going to it and the power on.  Would this still cause issues if this is the only thing hooked up?  If so could I just unhook the firewall from the switch, or would it be better to turn off windows firewall on the machines? By the way thank you for helping here.  I have just been in class for this stuff for 3 weeks now and don't know that much stuff yet.