Covers the process of connecting a computer to a Cisco 2960 switch via Ethernet and manually configuring a static IPv4 address when no DHCP server is available on the network.
Connecting PC to Switch
It's finally time to get something plugged into the switch. We're going to connect the computer to the switch, not the console cable, but connect into the Ethernet and see what it looks like.
We're going to be connecting into one of the 2960s, and we're going to be connecting into the Ethernet port Fa0/14. So we're going to plug it into Fa0/14 on the switch side, and then on the computer we'll plug it into the port on the computer.
Now I'm on that 2960 here, so let's take a look and see what it looks like. If you recall from one of my previous videos, we did a show ip interface brief to see some of the interfaces and see what status they were in, so let's take a look at that status now. I'm going to jump into the privileged EXEC mode and I'm going to do show ip interface brief.
Now this device is connected to the switch. It has a layer two connection, so at this point in time it would be able to send out a frame onto the network, and the switch would be able to forward that frame on to whatever device, so we would have some sort of communication going. But it's just layer two, and most of our devices now need some sort of IP address, layer three and layer four information, in order for it to communicate effectively on our networks.
So do we have that, do we have an IP address? What I'm going to do is pull up a command prompt. I click the Windows button, I type in cmd to bring up a command prompt, and here I do an ipconfig. Then it gives me some information about the configurations of the network card, and what I see here is the Ethernet adapter, which is the one that I plugged into the switch.
If you recall, this address of 169.254 is an APIPA address, and what that means is that it automatically assigned an address to it in this range. It randomly chose 52.2. It randomly chose that because it didn't get an IP address. It probably tried to look out and say, hey, is there a DHCP server out there, I'm requesting an IP address, and didn't get a response back, because I don't have a DHCP server on the network, so nothing responded back. So we see that this didn't get an address and so it automatically address to it.
What we're going to need to do for it to effectively communicate on the network: if there's two devices on this network that both had an APIPA address, we'd be able to communicate between the two, but most likely what we want to do is assign an address that we've assigned as a network address for the whole network.
I see this is connected wirelessly, so I'm actually remoted into this machine, but I'm going to right click this and say open network and internet settings. It's going to open up, and we see here that it is in fact connected to the wireless but it's not connected to the Ethernet. For all my labs I want to connect to the Ethernet, so I'm going to click on properties here. We see here that yes, in fact it is looking for an automatic IP address, or a DHCP, a dynamic host configuration protocol. It did not receive a response back, and so what we want to do is manually assign something to this machine.
I click on edit, and here we click the drop down and select manual instead. For the purpose of this class we're mostly going to be working with IPv4, so I'm going to turn that on, and then I'm going to come up with an IP address for this machine. Ahead of time I would want to know what my IP address range is that I could assign to this machine. Later on, as we work through this, we'll actually assign some IP addresses to our network, so it's going to be important, but for the purpose of this demo we're going to do a 10.0.0.15, 56, let's do 56.
Then the subnet prefix length: we're just going to say eight here, we're going to open it up, this is going to be a huge network. And the gateway: a lot of times it's the first address of the network, the first usable address, so a lot of the time, in this case right here, it'll be 10.0.0.1.
Any preferred DNS that we use: a lot of times that could be your router. In your homes it would be your router. Within the Active Directory network you probably have a DHCP server and a DNS server, where the DNS specifically is associated with Active Directory. In this case right here we're going to just use something that's external, so one that I do use a lot is 8.8.8.8, and that's an external IP address. You could also use something like OpenDNS, so there are free ones out there.
Then I'm going to save this information, and now this is connected on the network. If I connect another device onto the network, then I'd be able to ping that address or connect into that address, as long as it's on the same network as this computer is.
So there you have it. We've got our machine now configured and it's connected into the switch, and now we can start sending traffic across here.
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