Adding a router/wap to my network

This week I added a Netgear WGR614 router/wap and rerouted my DSL to it. To get it to work I needed to add another LAN card to my SBS server. I had a spare LAN card so it should not have been a problem except ….the LAN card was not supported by W2K3. It is an old but reliable Netgear FA310TX so I started searching the web for help. At Drivers Guide I browsed the list for Netgear LAN drivers and found updated files for W2K, XP, and W2K3. The W2K3 file worked just fine. Once the card was up it got an IP address from the router. I ran the internet configuration wizard and everything was fine except that I really wanted the IP address to be static.

Today I decided to fix this problem so I set a static address for the LAN card going to the router. The SBS DHCP promptly shut down. Huh? The error message said it was shutting down because it found another DHCP server. Yes, the router is another DHCP server but it was serving IP addresses for another scope. I tried several things to no avail. Finally I set the LAN card back to DHCP, set up the first couple of IP addresses in the router’s LAN(DMZ) as static IP addresses, and then turned off DHCP on the router. I went back to the SBS server and set the LAN card as a static IP and ran the internet configuration wizard again. When it was finished I went back to the router and restarted the DHCP server. Now I had a static IP address for the LAN card and two happy DHCP servers.

The most curious side effect of this change over was the disabling the synchronization of the local time services to internet time servers. The first clue I got was repeated emails from the Healthmonitor running on my desktop complaining about  “Time Provider NtpClient: No valid response has been received from domain controller”. I went to the server and found that something had disabled the Windows Time Service! My guess for the likely culprit is the internet configuration wizard I ran when I installed the new LAN card. I changed the service back to automatic and started it. It seemed okay but I wanted to be sure so I tried to force a resync. I got an error message complaining that no time data was available. I checked the registry and it had been changed from NTP to NoSync. I changed this back to NTP and then forced the resync using:

w32tm /resync /rediscover

Now it was synching again. Whew! This was harder than I anticipated.