Hi, If i understand your situation correctly, you need to have a port on the switch free from a vlan configuration. This port will serve as your trunk or the "stick" going to your router. Answers to your questions: 1. The router should physically plug into the port where you have configured the trunk. 2. The addressing scheme for the router / router interface should be different from all your other vlans. Besides, your router doesn't need to have an ip address if you are routing local vlans. This is true if you will be configuring sub-interfaces on a particular interface on your router (i'll show this later) 3. You do not need to have a routing protocol to have all vlans communicate. 4.  In order to connect to the internet, your router must have static routing enabled on your router. But i'll show you how to configure the trunk first. Since you have already configured the VLANs on the switch, we can skip right to creating the trunk to allow your vlans to "talk" to each other. Assuming that we have Cisco devices (router and switches) in this case. But since it's not a Cisco router, i'll just add a simple explanation on every line of code so you will understand the concept. Now, FA0/24 is not part of any VLAN on your switch, right?. Ok.. so plug your router interface (for example FA1/0) in this port. Now you have a physical connection for a trunk that you will be configuring later on. So the physical connection of your switch to the router is now SWITCH FA0/24 <-----> ROUTER FA1/0 First you configure sub interfaces on FA1/0 on your Router to tag your VLANS and use the 802.1q configuration for VLAN tagging. Here is an example configuration base on your network addressing scheme. Using the Cisco IOS configuration on the Cisco router: Router>Enable Router#Config Terminal Router(config)# Interface Fa1/0.2 ----------->this will create the sub interface FA1/0.2. This is your VLAN 2 Router(config-subif)#encapsulation dot1q 2 -------->this will encapsulate the subinterface and will tag it as a vlan interface Router(config-subif)#ip address 192.168.40.1 255.255.255.0 ----> the ip address 192.168.40.1 will serve as your gateway for all hosts connected on vlan 2 later on when the configuration is done. Router(config)# Interface Fa1/0.3 ----------->this will create the sub interface FA1/0.3. This is your VLAN 3 Router(config-subif)#encapsulation dot1q 3 -------->this will encapsulate the subinterface and will tag it as a vlan interface Router(config-subif)#ip address 192.168.10.1 255.255.255.0 ----> the ip address 192.168.10.1 will serve as your gateway for all hosts connected on vlan 2 later on when the configuration is done. Router(config-subif)# exit Router(config)#interface fa1/0 ----> to configure the FA1/0 interface Router)config)#no shutdown -----> to "up" the port FA1/0 Second is to configure the trunk.. Now let's proceed to the switch.. Switch>Enable Switch#configure terminal ----> to go to the global configuration mode Switch(config) interface fa0/24 ------> to go to the configuration mode of the interface FA0/24. remember that the FA0/24 of the switch port is where we plugged the router. Switch(config-if)#switchport mode trunk ------> this will configure the port as the trunk of all your vlans on the switch Switch(config-if)#switchport trunk allowed vlan all -----> this configuration will allow ALL vlans to use the trunk (FA0/24). This will basically allow all vlans to "talk" Switch(config-if)#exit Switch(config)#exit Hope this helps you in understanding vlan. Good luck. Feel free to reply if there are any more issues. I'll do all i can to help out. Don't forget to give ratings!! Regards... ... View more