Weird networking problem.

I recently purchased a second computer to use to learn linux on and I want to hook it up to my home network.

The current network setup goes: modem -> router -> office wall jack -> basement cable splice -> my wall jack -> my computer.

This works fine, no problems. (By splice I mean I have the cat5 from the office rigged together with the cat5 going to my wall jack. My dad did a last minute design change on the home network and just left all the cat5 hanging down from the ceiling in the basement. It's ugly but it works fine.)

For various reasons I can not have the linux box set up in the office near the router so I made some space for it in my room and purchased a switch to connect both computers in my room together and to the router.

This didn't work. My computer detects a new network behind the switch and can't connect to the router.

After doing some testing we (me and my dad) found that using ( modem -> router -> switch -> wall/basement/wall -> my computer ) worked fine, as opposed to ( modem -> router -> wall/basement/wall -> switch -> my computer). That didn't work.

Anyone have any ideas why simply moving the switch from one point in the network segment to another would cause it to not work?

(Oh, and I'm an almost total networking newbie, so please parden any language mis-use, I hope I explained this properly. It makes sense to me, at any rate.)

Any help would be wonderful.

- Strahn -

I think you might want to check the signal strength to the basement connector. Long runs with cat5 aren't the best way to do things. I was forced to use wireless instead of cat5e due to the signal loss that occured over the 100' run.

Another issue, when connecting multiple switches/routers, you have to ensure that they can communicate with each other... This is usually accomplished by the routing tables... However, I'm thinking that you can easily resolve this by ensuring the the new devices network settings are such that it connects to the current network... You will need to go into the setup of the new switch and tell it to use a static ip address that belongs to the current network... From there you would want to have it issue a block of DHCP addresses (if you will eventually connect more computers to it) or handle a block of statically assigned addresses (just ensure you set your computer to one of these addresses if you go this route)...

-sage-

Did the new switch you bought also have a router in it? If so were you using the WAN port on it? In this instance if you wanted to connect the two computers in your room together and then with the rest of your network, you wouldn't want to use the WAN port on the switch/router. You'd just want to plug everything into the regular switch ports.

Also, were you sure there was a link between your switch and your router? You probably need to use a cross over cable instead of a regular patch/straight through cable.