47
2-6 Home Network (LAN: Local Area Network) Configuration
A LAN is the network within your home.
All computers accessing your
Internet connection through the HW2R1 are considered part of your Home
Network.
Each of these users will either have their own manually configured
IP address or an automatically configured IP address from the HW2R1 via the
Smart Repeater’s DHCP server.
There are two ways to assign IP addresses to computers: static IP address
(set the IP address for every computer manually), and dynamic IP address (IP
address of computers will be assigned by Smart Repeater automatically. It’s
recommended for most computers to use dynamic IP address, it will save a lot
of time on setting IP addresses for every computer, especially when there are
a lot of computers in your network; for servers and network devices which will
provide services to other computers and users that come from the Internet, a
static IP address should be used.
Suggestions on IP address numbering plan:
If you have no idea on how to define an IP address plan for your
network, here are some suggestions.
1. A valid IP address has 4 fields: a.b.c.d, for most of home and
company users, it’s suggested to use 192.168.c.d, where c is
an integer between 0 and 254, and d is an integer between 1
and 254. This Smart Repeater is capable to work with up to 253
clients, so you can set ‘d’ field of IP address of Smart Repeater
as 1 or 254 (or any number between 1 and 254), and pick a
number between 0 and 254 for field ‘c’.
2. In most cases, you should use ‘255.255.255.0’ as subnet mask,
which allows up to 253 clients (this also meets Smart
Repeater’s capability of working with up to 253 clients).
3. For all servers and network devices which will provide
services to other people (like Internet service, print service,
and file service), they should use static IP address. Give each
of them a unique number between 1 and 253, and maintain a
list, so everyone can locate those servers easily.
4. For computers which are not dedicated to provide specific
service to others, they should use dynamic IP address.
If you don’t really understand the descriptions listed above, don’t worry! We
will provide recommended setup values below.