Two networks, one home

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I want to seperate my home work and browsing Internet network from my home media network devices to avoid data dropouts here and there from overloaded gigabit network traffic. The catch is the media network needs to stay inline with the Internet because some of the devices allow access to YouTube and NetFlix and the like.

Therefore what I propose to do is put another router between the the current router and the modem, which is also a one port router.
Then make the I.P. address of the 1st router’s (with all the work compters) WAN port static and in line with the default gateway I.P. address of the new media router. In other words, if the media router default gateway is 192.168.2.1, I’ll make the work router WAN port 192.168.2.2; and then make a similar adjustment betwen the new media router and the modem/router.

DHCP will be active on all routers. Internet traffic would still be affected by demand (its only a 1.3 megabit connection) but that should otherwise completely seperate the media network from the work network right? Also I won’t be able to communicate with the two networks from one another since they will have different 3rd number I.P. addresses right? Unless I have a second wireless adapter in one or more of the work computers that I can configure to the media network, and thereby transfer some media files on occasion right?

So does that method sound viable? Will it work? Will it perform as expected? Do I have it backwards and the network types should be switched for some reason?

Thanks in advance for more learned consideration than I have (a dream!)., and Happy New Yar!

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You are asking for trouble with a complex set up like that.

If you have Gbit connections you will never be able to overload the network unless you have 1000s of computers. What you may find is that your switch is not fast enough internally to pass the data if you are running the network hard. Cheap switches will run one network port at or near capacity, but once you add 3 or 4 ports the whole lot slows and you may lose packets.

Can you send some details of the traffic across your network and the switch name/model?

cheers, Paul

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It’s definitely a hodgepodge that grew as the network grew. Switches are all run of the mill consumer, 3 of which are DLink DSG2208 8-ports and three of which are 5 port Trendnet TEGS50 Greennet switches, and the current router is a DLink gigabit gaming router. Most of all the switches are jammed to 100% port capacity and there’s a couple others I didn’t even mention. I’ve gotten in the habit of living on many computers through one with RDC. Why right now I’m redering media data from a network location on this computer, have 8 remotes going, am rendering data from network locations on two other computers (mostly old video cleanup tasks so lots of filtering, lots of time), not to mention remote editing of hours and hours of PCM WAV audio on weekdays from two more networked locations and always with two or three network location .psd editing tasks going, and usually a few multi-gigabyte data transfers going on any single day.
Then add on top of that all the media device playback of hi-def home consumer video at totally unpredictable times (family member habits being what they are), usually in the 4.5 to 6 gigabyte an hour range on the top end, usually only from and to one device, but sometimes two and once in a great while, 3. Many of the media playback devices will report network speed and that ranges from a low of about 13,000 kilobits/s to a high of almost 50,000 kb/s.

Most times the video playback is just fine but now and then there will be packet loss on the high end video and it will stutter for a sec or pixellate.

Sounds like I may benefit just from unjamming all the switch ports doesn’t it? I have no problem running an inline router handoff setup, I mainly want to know if seperating the media storage and playback network is going to run free and clear of any packet loss except from the Internet of course which I can’t control. I figure it would be almost impossible for me to clean up the configuration of the work network at this point, nor would it be possible for me to change my network “overlording” habits.

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Those data rates don’t look too onerous – 6GB/h = 13kb/s on a 1Gb/s port.
Do you have all the servers on one switch? If you split them across switches it might ease the load.
It is possible your servers can’t keep up with the disk loads?

cheers, Paul

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Yeah, I’m sure the NAS server gets a little grogy if the demand is too high, and I hope I don’t find its the ultimate culprit for the slight drops with the hi-def streams. I’m going to give the seperate network idea a try and see how it works. The media network router insertion between the work router and the modem/router went without a hitch…or I wouldn’t be writing this right now…I’ll start changing I.P.s on the media devices and hooking them up later today…with fingers crossed!

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Well so far so good, no skipping during some particularly high bitrate playback scenes that were causing a problem before. The networks are not under a lot of stress today though so we’ll see as time goes on this week under normal use. Only had one puzzling moment when configuring the OPlay! Asus Media players, in that the available media list included a workgroup from the other network. How can this be I thought, how can it be doing some kind of I.P. translation protocol and be connected with the other network?? Then after a couple of minutes, a flash fire roared through my vacuous mind and I realized that a wireless adapter on one of that workgroup’s computers couldn’t resist the sexy allure of the new wireless connection and jumped over to it.

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