So the question is this. I have an AV receiver, PS3 and bluray player all in the home theater. All of them have ethernet ports but I just have one Cat5 50m cable coming from my router in the ground floor into the home theater 2 floors above. What is the recommended method to "split" the ethernet cable in order to feed all 3 devices in the HT and guarantee that they will all "see" my western digital NAS which is connected to the router in the ground floor. I am guessing a gigabit switch but would like the opinion of more experienced users. Thanks.
Regards...
Posted on: 19 October 2011 by NickSeattle
If your network is simple, a basic switch will work. Use the minimum number of switches possible, eliminating unnecessary daisy chains. If you have a lot of nodes, you might take it up a notch with a managed switch, to add the Q.O.S. capability to prioritize traffic to streaming devices ahead of less critical traffic. Entry-level managed switches by e.g. Netgear cost only slightly more than an ordinary switch; you can ignore the added functionality unless you decide you need it. I am not an expert yet with configuring managed switches, but am learning. Keeping all switches on the network the same brand and family means you can manage them all in one interface. I bought a second, beefier Netgear Smart Switch and was disappointed to find I had to install a different utility to manage it than for my first switch. I have yet to override any of the default settings, as I have no performance problems with streaming.
Real network engineers will have more details that I will enjoy reading along with you.
Nick
Posted on: 19 October 2011 by Flame
Dear Nick,
Here is the deal. Didn't find a switch at my local electronics/computer store so I decided to use a spare router to split the ethernet signal. To briefly describe the setup, my ADSL line and NAS drive are connected to a Linksys wireless modem/router in the ground floor. A Cat5 connects the first modem/router to another Linksys router (no modem capabilities) in the home theater to which I connect the PS3 and Onkyo at present.
What happened is that both the PS3 and Onkyo have gained internet access but neither can see my NAS drive. Any suggestions???
Regards...
Posted on: 19 October 2011 by NickSeattle
Make sure that the second (Linksys) router you inserted is set to Bridged mode to make it behave more like a switch than a router. That will allow it to join your existing network transparently, rather than becoming a barrier (AKA Firewall) between nodes on either side, which it is primarily designed to do. You should see that all nodes are on the same subnet after making this change and power-cycling everything once or twice. Verifying the IP addresses are self-setting to the same subnet (e.g. 10.21.0.x or 192.168.1.x or similar) is the key.
There are more sophisticated approaches where you can preserve the firewall capabilities using ports, but I do not know how to do this; and I see no reason why you would want to.
