Using a wireless router as a home network switch

Question

I have a Linksys WRT54G wireless router that I used to have set up in the traditional way (cable modem plugs into uplink port of router, computers/laptop plug directly into the router or connect wirelessly). Never had any issues.

My new house, unfortunately, is out of the range of both DSL and cable modem, so the only internet option I have is using a wireless USB card from AT&T (pretty good upload/download speeds, actually, so I'm not complaining... much).

So I want my computer and my XBox360 to be able to talk to each other (so I can use it as a Media Extender), and tried using my router, but they only seem to be able to talk sporadically. I think the router is confusing things because it was originally configured to push traffic directly to the cable modem, which doesn't exist any more.

Is there a way to "turn off" the routing features and use this as a "traditional" switch? Do I need a different piece of hardware? Should I manually configure IP addresses on both the pc and the XBox? Or should they be able to auto-configure?

I've heard of people just using a straight network cable directly from the XBox to the PC, but I could never get that to work (plus I want to reserve the right to add more computers or WMExtenders, maybe)

Answer 1

Most routers have some variations on your requested functionality, but not all.

By default, the wireless interface, and the 4 LAN ports are "switched". What may cause issues is the router's DHCP server. For simple LAN functionality, you can disable it via the steps shown on Page 6 of the WRT54g manual.

By disabling your DHCP server, the responsibility of ensuring that everything in the network has an IP address falls to you. The LAN connection on your computer should have an IP address from 192.168.1.1-192.168.1.254, and the X-Box, a different address. Subnet Masks will be 255.255.255.0 and the Gateway will be the IP address of your computer.

Answer 2

If you want to go with ont cable from Xbox to PC you probably would need a crossover cable. However, your router should be able to do it. Make sure your router is set up with DHCP on and plug both computers into the switch ports, and nothing into the "LAN" port.

Watch out how much you downloat over that AT&T card...most have caps at about 5GB