cannot login to vpn firewall fvs318 after disabling dhcp - what did i do??
Please bear with me - I am not a network expert by any means and I know just enough to be dangerous.
I have had the VPN Firewall model FVS318 with 8-port switch for a long time and it has always worked fine with my cable modem internet connection from Comcast. I was using Comcast's Arris cable modem, which had only a single port on it that I connected to the WAN port of the FVS318. My wired devices connected directly to it, and I had a wireless access point that connected to one of its ports for my wireless devices. I always had the FVS318 set up with DHCP enabled for the various devices connected to it. Pretty simple, always worked great. So far, so good.
Yesterday Comcast came and gave me a new device to upgrade/speed-up my service - a Cisco DPC3939 wireless gateway. Unlike the Arris device, this new thing is a cable modem and wireless router in one - and it also has 4 Ethernet ports in the back for wired devices. If I connect my wired devices (like the PC I am using right now) directly to the back of the DPC3939 (not using the FVS318 or anything else - just a straight connection) then I can get to the internet and also see everything else on my home network, wired or wireless.
However, I have many more than 4 wired devices in total. So I thought that I could simply plug the FVS318 into one of the 4 ports of the DPC3939, just as I did with the old Arris, and thus have more total ports available to me. Of course, this did not work. Not knowing what I am doing I then tried different things - plugging the cable into the "internet" port of the FVS318, plugging it into any of the "local" ports of the FVS318, plugging the other end into each of the 4 ports on the DPC3939 - and nothing worked.
A little bit of Googling brought me to a page explaining that the problem might be a conflict between DHCP servers - one in the DPC3939 and one in the FVS318. I decided to keep DHCP in the new gateway and disabled it in the FVS318. As I understand it, doing this changes the FVS318 into a plain old unmanaged simple switch. I changed the DHCP settings in the gateway so that it only handed out a limited range (from 10.0.0.2 to 10.0.0.200), and then I logged into the FVS318 (using routerlogin.net) and disabled DHCP and gave it a fixed IP address of 10.0.0.233. Turning everything off and then turning everything back on in order (gateway, switch, end-user devices) seemed to work - I can see all the devices on my home network, and everything can get to the internet. All of this might have worked by blind luck, but it seems to work.
My problem, finally, is that I cannot seem to log back in to the FVS318 any more. If I try routerlogin.net, or if I try 10.0.0.233, or even if I try 192.168.0.1, I get the same "this web page is not available" with "ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED" error page (using Chrome). What did I do? Is there any way to get back in there other than by restoring the factory defaults?
And if anyone would like to comment on my change to the FVS318 to turn it into just a switch I would appreciate that too. Was that the right thing to do, or did I just get lucky? Should I have done something different?
Let us isolate the problem. If you connect a PC directly to any of the LAN port of the FVS318, are you able to get replies when you ping the IP address 10.0.0.233?
I look forward to your response. Welcome to the community! 🙂
Re: cannot login to vpn firewall fvs318 after disabling dhcp - what did i do??
Hi DaneA - thank you for replying!
I am typing on the PC that I just connected to a LAN port, so obviously I can get to the internet. When I ping 10.0.0.233 I get "Reply from 10.0.0.73: Destination host unreachable", although it does say that with "Ping statistics for 10.0.0.233" that it sent 4 packets and received 4 packets. I assume that 10.0.0.73 is the IP address of this very PC?
Not sure if that means it was successful or not. Again, I am not very experienced at this 🙂
