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Sharing across Subnets

Hi there,


I work for a company where we have a wired lan and a wireless lan.


The wired lan is 192.168.97.* and the wireless is 192.168.98.*


When connected to the wired LAN, we are able to see all shared machine who are also on the .97 subnet.


When connected to the wireless LAN, we are able to see all shared machines who are on the .98 subnet.


When on the wireless, we are able to ping all .97 addresses on the wired LAN no problem.


However, I need the .97 shared machines to show up under 'shared' within finder when users are connected to the .98 network (wireless)


Can anyone point me in the right direction as to how I can do this ?

Posted on Dec 4, 2012 8:53 PM

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3 replies

Dec 5, 2012 6:08 AM in response to martinfromvic

Buy more expensive routers :-)

If you are using consumer routers, you are limited in what you can do.


The easy thing would be to stop using the 192.168.98.* subnet, tell the WiFi router to become a "Bridge" and share the 192.168.97.* subnet. Depending on the router, this is done by an explicit "Bridge" mode setting (Apple Airport Extreme), or in some cases it is disabling DHCP server on the router, or some routers require you to disable DHCP and NAT servers. But once you do that, it disables routing and turns the device into a "Bridge" that shares the ethernet subnet with WiFi devices.


Of course if your company is so big that you have more than 200'ish devices including routers, networked printers, mobile devices, computers, etc.... just using a single subnet driven by a consumer router may be an issue.


Also if you have that many devices a consumer router may have issues moving all that data.


There are consumer routers that allow you to replace the firmware with an open source router firmware that would give you more flexibility in configuring your subnet, such as changing the router's subnet mask from 255.255.255.0 to something that allows more devices, such as 255.255.0.0, but again, now your router needs to have the horse power to handle all the devices.

Dec 5, 2012 1:46 PM in response to BobHarris

Thanks for your reply.


The reason we use the .98 subnet for our wireless clients is;


1. We want to limit the amount of addresses on our .97 subnet. Like you said we have too many devices already occupying this.


2. We want to isolate and control the .98 network differently for certain things.


Our wireless .98 clients are able to ping all of our .97 shares no problem.


My issue is that when on the .98 wireless subnet, the .97 shared devices don't show up under shared in the finder window.

Dec 5, 2012 1:57 PM in response to martinfromvic

My issue is that when on the .98 wireless subnet, the .97 shared devices don't show up under shared in the finder window.

Because Bonjour (Zeroconf) does not cross a router boundary. These auto-discovery protocols only work within a single subnet.


Maybe if you purchased a higher end commercial router for your WiFi subnet, it might have a feature to propage Zeroconf (Bonjour) auto-discovery protocols. Or maybe if you get a WiFi router that allows the firmware to be replaced with DD-WRT, Tomato, MyOpenRouter, etc... might have the abilities to propagate Zeroconf (Bonjour) auto-discovery protocols.


All I can tell you is Zeroconf (Bonjour) will not cross a router boundary by default, and consumer (home) routers do not have options to override this.

Sharing across Subnets

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