Firewall To Split A Subnet

We’ve found a cheap little NetGear router that can roughly load balance and fail-over between our two internet connections to hopefully get a little bit more speed. Of course, the simplest thing to do is to set it up so that from the inside it looks just like the old modem and then on the WAN side set it up to look like a client using that old modem as it’s router. Of course, that means that the inside and outside of the router are in the same subnet (192.168.0.0) in this case and the new router’s internal IP is also the IP of the WAN router it forwards on to.

If your mind can’t handle that, don’t worry – neither could the NetGear router’s.  Shame though, it was such a simple way to configure things. Now I either have to change all the internal IPs and find anywhere they happen to have been hard coded and update them, or get the ISP that manages the modem to change it’s internal IP. We’ve sent the word to the ISP but it’s filtering its way up the chain of suppliers to the real ISP that actually runs things. Oh and of course since last time we called our ISPs been bought out by someone else again.

If only we were big enough that the top level provider considered us worth dealing with…. Sigh.