Thanks for the info. The only problem is I cant use one or the other as the netopia router has no wireless capability (and only 1 ethernet port) and the wireless has no dsl port so i have to use both together.
no problem. you should be plugging the LAN port on the netopia into one of the LAN ports on the wireless accesspoint. is the wireless access point actually a router also? does it have a WAN interface? does it have more than one LAN port? if not, then it is not a switch. you will have to buy a switch, or hub, and plug the routers LAN port into the switch/hub and plug the wireless AP into the switch/hub. hubs are cheaper than switches, but they aren't as clevUr. simply put, what comes in one port is forwarded out all other ports with a hub. a switch on the other hand is "knows" about layer 2 (of the ISOs OSI model) so it will make port forwarding decisions based on MAC addresses. which is cool. basically this dedicates bandwidth to your port. if port 1 transfers a file to a node on port 4, and you are on port 3, you aren't effected by the transfer whereas with a hub you would be ... meh, i'm going off on a tangent here.
Impresive, but, out of curiousity, why do you prefer the 10.x.x.x IP addressing?
a few reasons actually. none of them are profound or anything.
the ten network is non-routable, just like 192.168.
the ten network is a class A, so it has room for about 16 million hosts, unlike the 65 thousand available with the 192.168. (it's a
macho thing).
ten network addresses can look like binary numbers and confuse people! for example, 10.10.10.10/8, or 10.10.0.0/8. normally, people ignore the mask because it scares and confuses them, 10.10.0.0 kind of looks like a network address, but it actually contains the network and host address. you can have fun with the private 192 address like this too, if you use a mask of 240, for example, 192.168.1.0/24 is eircoms net address, you can setup a 192.168.1.0/20, which is a host address
looks more confusing with the ten network though, i think.
because of the large address space for hosts on the ten network you can hide servers and stuff throughout. it takes significantly longer to scan an address space of 16 million than it would an address space of 254. though you can use the 192.168.x.x/16 and increase the address space to 65K people normally use a /24 and only have room for 254 hosts (can't use 0 and 255, so it's 254 hosts, not 256). you can't get the millions with a class C, you need a class A.
also, i find ten addresses easier to type if you just use 1s and 0s!
never even thought about using the private class B, 172.16.0.0
looks a bit quare.