Two Lans... One Connection...

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randyc

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I was recently contacted by a local dentist office that I go to setup some stuff...

Here's what I need to do.
They have one DSL connection going into the office. The DSL connection is waaay more than what they need, but they enjoy the broadband ;-)

This office has two doctors, ones ortho and the other is a plain' ol' dentist. Ortho man has his software and his own fleet of laptops, and then Mr PoD (Plain old dentist) has his set of workstations. They need to have seperate inaccessible to each other networks.

Right now the solution we are going for is to order a second DSL line, but is there a way to split the networks? I would just say different subnets, but its not what we require. They have to be physically seperate. We were considering getting a new router that has VLAN support, but I don't know of any routers or switches that are easy to configure or don't require too much knowledge. I'm all for learning, but as as far as my knowledge goes, it stops at where CISCO starts. Are there any routers that support VLAN's that could also share one internet connection?

any advice here?
 
what you can look into are switches that support vlan...that might be as close as youll get.
 
How about using three routers...

Code: 
DSL  ->  Router  -> Router ->  Lan 1
                 -> Router ->  Lan 2
Would this work?
 
You can find some switches that support vlans. Cheaper ones that have simple web-gui's to set them up. One of my first thoughts of course, was a cisco. But that isnt simple.

Dlink makes a few "smart" switches that are all web managed and are actually quite good.
 
If you want simple, I'd go with Met's suggestion. Buy three cheap routers. You could set each one up to NAT the machine behind it. Or if you want to get fancy and the routers are a little more sophisticated, you can subnet and route.

Of course you could do the same with a single Linux machine, three NICS, and 2 switches (or one switch that does VLANs). If you have old hardware lying around this would be the cheapest solution. The nice thing is you would have total control of both networks and the routing between them.

Code: 
               -- LAN 1
              |
DSL -- Linux router
              |     
               -- LAN 2
 
Linksys/Cisco RV082 or RV016 models. (8 port and 16 port)
It's a business grade router, that have built in VPN servers (both IPSec and PPTP), high availability stable firmware, dual WAN ports so you can load balance/failover redundancy 2x internet connections..and more importantly in your case....it has a built in managed switch which supports port based VLANs.

Now..depending upon how many PCs you have in each office, if more than a dozen which would fill up the 16 port model....simply uplink one of those ports to another switch.

Router doing VPN for you, allows remote support of them, and remote access for peeps to work from home.

It's wonderfully easy, just one device...the typical Linksys ease of setup web admin. Nothing fancy needed to learn. This is their business grade product, very stable and fast. I have fleets of them out there now in service, and I'm using these in setups where I'd normally use Sonicwall or Cisco PIX boxes.
 
bassman said:
If you want simple, I'd go with Met's suggestion. Buy three cheap routers. You could set each one up to NAT the machine behind it. Or if you want to get fancy and the routers are a little more sophisticated, you can subnet and route.

Of course you could do the same with a single Linux machine, three NICS, and 2 switches (or one switch that does VLANs). If you have old hardware lying around this would be the cheapest solution. The nice thing is you would have total control of both networks and the routing between them.

Code: 
               -- LAN 1
              |
DSL -- Linux router
              |     
               -- LAN 2
Click to expand...


To me this would be the easiest solution.
 
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