Use my westel327w as a router connected to my cable modem.

[foolios]

I have done this before where I had gotten cable on the $19.99/month special for 6 months. I switched over from dsl to cable so I found a post about how to turn your westel 327 into a wireless router for your cable network. It worked like a charm back when I did it before. Well, my year is up for dsl so I went back to cable on the special again, but this time, I can not get the westel to work with the cable modem again.
The directions for doing it are here: »Re: Use Versalink 327W with cable modem
It was suggested to me by the cable forum that I ask here.
There are two things I am not certain about as I've lost the detailed directions I had made long ago in case I wanted to do this again. For one, is ethernet port 1 the uplink port or is ethernet port 4 the uplink port? I looked at a user guide and it says E1 but there is a networking picture over E4. So I'm not sure. I have been trying with no avail but it may be because of another issue. I am asking to be sure as I've tried everything anyways. The second question I had was should I be using a straight-thru cable or a crossover cable to connect the westel to the surfboard cable modem? I am guessing straight-thru if indeed one of the ports are designated as uplink, right? The funny thing about the uplink port is, normally it is a regular ethernet port to hook up to my computer, yet for the purposes of connecting a router or whathave you it says that that same port becomes an uplink port. So I'm not sure if it means it is specially configured to do both without changing the wiring around. Not sure, that's why the confusion over which of the two cable types to use to connect the two devices with.
Well, I believe I've tried quite a bit of different ways with the cables and the ports with no luck. One thing I notice is that the instructions say to enable dhcp after the first reset happens to the westel but when I check it it's already enabled. I dunno why that would be there in the instructions if it didn't need to be done. Well, I am just grabbing at anything now I guess. I hope someone has run into a similar situation and has a solution.
Thanks in advance.

[johnwill]

It doesn't matter which is the "uplink" port, if the ports are not auto-sensing, you just need a crossover cable. You can use any port.

You can't turn this into a wireless router, since the DSL interface is on the router side. You can use it as a wireless switch, but I suspect it'll only work with one computer unless you have an unusual cable account with multiple public IP addresses.

Since you didn't provide a link to the instructions, I can't comment on those. Here's my "standard" method of connecting two routers...

Connecting two SOHO broadband routers together.

Configure the IP address of the secondary router to be in the same subnet as the primary router, but out of the range of the DHCP server in the primary router. For instance DHCP server addresses 192.168.0.2 through 192.168.0.100, I'd assign the secondary router 192.168.0.254 as it's IP address.

Disable the DHCP server in the secondary router.

Setup the wireless section just the way you would if it was the primary router.

Connect from the primary router's LAN port to one of the LAN ports on the secondary router. If there is no uplink port and neither of the routers have auto-sensing ports, use a cross-over cable. Leave the WAN port unconnected!

[foolios]

I'm sorry, the link is here:

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,13789255?hilite=versalink+327w+cable+modem
I will try to do as much as I can as you say. There is no configuration in the motorola surfboard sb5120 cable modem. So, I'll do what I can with the westell 327w dsl modem/wireless router.
This did work for me before. Maybe I did as you said with the subnet and that's the trick I need to get it to gel.
Thank you for the help. I will let ya know how it turns out.

[foolios]

Ok, that didn't work but I noticed that the cable modem and the westel both have different subnet masks, the cable modem has 255.255.254.0 while the westell has 255.255.255.0. So I changed the westell's subnet mask to match that of the cable modem and it still didn't work. Was that the right thing to do?

[johnwill]

Don't change the subnet mask in the router, it should remain at 255.255.255.0. SOHO routers only work on a class-C subnet.

The cable modem may have a different subnet mask, but that's a different issue. Since the cable modem does not have a NAT layer, you can't really use the two together in this fashion. You need a standard broadband router with an Ethernet connection.

[foolios]

It was the subnet mask, put it back to what it was originally and changed the ip of the westell dslmodem/wireless router to outside the range of the cable modem.

Works!

Thanks all.

[johnwill]

Glad you got it going.