Some clients, who live far, far away, have a tangled home LAN that I believe I will be drafted to fix in late summer.
AFAIK, the topology is like this:
[cable modem] –> [non-apple wireless router + 5 port hub] –> Apple OS X PowerBook, Wintel Latop B, Wintel Box C, Wintel Box D
I believe A(pple) and B are wirelessly on the LAN, while C and D are wired to the hub. I believe they have a shared printer, but don’t know if it’s running off a computer, a print server, or has an ethernet connection. I suspect it’s a locally-shared printer running off of one of the wired Wintels. Roadrunner is the cable provider.
I believe they just plugged in the router and the AP and turned them on. They got the wireless hub a few years after the cable router modem. They’ve complained to me of a mysterious, troubleshooting-resistant inability to establish a VPN to his employer, something that ‘just happened.’
I have been unable to traceroute back to their machines; the trace stops at the cable modem. The net effect of this is that I can’t set up VNC to look directly at their computers’ settings.
I strongly suspect that both the router modem and the AP are acting as DHCP servers; I believe this would account for the network problems they’ve mentioned. They said “Huh?” when I asked if their cable provider had given them docs on configuring the cable modem (to do things like setting up port forwarding, for example).
A series of questions, then:
Given a stable, if reerky, IP topology like this:
192.x.x.x -> 172.x.x.x -> 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2, …
where
- the 172-class number is a DHCP-assigned address from the 192-class modem
- and the 10-class addresses are assigned from the AP
[UPDATE: it’s unclear if the cable modem is a router itself or if DHCP was provisioned to the home via the ISP’s DHCP on the other side of the modem.]
1. is it going to be possible to set up a dynDNS solution that allows me to use VNC?
2. Do non-VNC remote screen viewers (Apple Remote Desktop and Timbuktu) provide an iChat-like way to route the data through spaghetti LANs so that I can see the local settings and work the problem without going there?
3. What will my options be regarding the cable modem? Can I just replace it with the router, if the hardware connections work? Alternatively, to what extent are Roadrunner cable modems user-configurable?
I am not planning on setting up any outward-facing servers, so I do not believe there’s even a potential violation of the cable provider’s TOS (WiFi notwithstanding).
Finally, in order to do this, I must brush up on my Wintel networking skillz. I’d love to hear some book recommendations.