Monday, November 17, 2008

Home Server with Multiple Subnets

I may be a little out of the norm with Home Server, but I have a home network with 2 subnets.  The reason is because I run a Sonicwall as my home router.  The wired LAN runs in 192.168.1.x and the wireless WLAN runs in 192.168.2.x .  This allows me to do guest wireless, and quite frankly, a business class router such as a Sonicwall just provides much more reliability, which is very important to me.

Ok, so now for how I got my WLAN clients to access the home server.  First of all, Home Server has a dynamic IP address, so because I’m a server guy, I just changed it to a static IP address on the LAN for the Sonicwall.  Next I went into the Windows Firewall on the Home Server

image

For each exception, I needed to verify that it allowed more than the Class-C subnet through the firewall.  I decided for simplicity, it was easier to change it from a class-C to a class-B subnet allowance (i.e. instead of 192.168.1.x through the firewall, it allows 192.168.x.x through the firewall).  This is slightly less secure, but it’s my home, and I have a pretty good WPA key on my wireless network.

Here are the steps to change each exception:

  1. Select an Exception, you’ll have to do this for all exceptions that are scoped to My Network (subnet) only, and choose Edit.
  2. On the Change Scope page, select Custom List, and place your cursor in the box
  3. For the subnet, type the static IP address of the server followed by a “/” and then the subnet for class-B networks (e.g. “192.168.1.2/255.255.0.0”) and choose OK.

That’s one exception that allows the WLAN clients into the home server.  Now go through all the exceptions and make this change, the WLAN clients just “popped” online without making a change on the client side.


5 comments:

GLO said...

Thanks for this.

I have been wanting to allow some of my WEP wifi clients access but have had to keep them on a different subnet but never put any time to towards it.

Your explanation makes complete sense and really is text book stuff that i should have thought about.

Thanks for sharing.

Sean Daniel said...

Happy I could help. :)

Anonymous said...

Hey Sean,

Any advice for WHS 2011? Don't see where to change the settings for this with the new firewall config.


Cheers,

Sleeman

Sean Daniel said...

start/control pannel/firewall, the UI hasn't changed really from 2003 as far as I know

Richard C. Lambert said...

Ok, so now for how I got my WLAN clients to access the home server. First of all, Home Server has a dynamic IP address, so because I’m a server guy, I just changed it to a static IP address on the LAN for the Sonicwall. Next I went into the Windows Firewall on the Home Server best sewing machine for kids