Ok this shouldnt be very hard. Depending on your ISP, they may give you a router/switch and a modem. IF they dont, youll need to go go buy them. Now, the most of the wired cable/dsl routers have a switch built on to them, most of the time a 4 port switch. It is possible to add up to 253 more computers to this router. All you need to do is take a cross-over network cable, plug it into the switch on your router and then plug it into your extra switch you bought. Youll loose two ports(one on the router/switch and one on your extra switch) from the connection with the crossover. Now about your ip problem. The router provides a function called NAT. This stands for network address translation. The whole point of this feature is to enable a site to use one "real" IP address. Since there are a limited number of unquie IP addresses, nat was bought about so you can assign your own private addresses. All you needed was one real ip address to connect to the internet. So the device that gets this one real ip address is your router. All your PCs, servers, and everything else that connects to the switch on the router will have an ip address from 192.168.1.2 to 192.168.1.253. The 192.168.1.X are called the private ip addresses. Now make note of this, your router also gets one of these private ips, depending on who made your router it will prolly be 192.168.1.1(this ip address is known as the gateway to the server, desktop PCs and whatever else is connected to your network), the instruction book will tell you so read it carefully. Then the 2nd ip address is the real ip that your ISP assigns to you. Your router will basicly act as a middle man. The outside world never sees your private ip addresses, they only see your one real ip that you get from you ISP. So all the requests made by all the computers on your network will look like they have been made by one single ip. Your router will remember who requested what so each computer gets what they asked for. If you got serveral static ip addresses, your prolly paying for them. Really, you only need one static IP to give to your router so you can cancel all but one of the static ips. Remember you will set your server and desktops to the private ip address. And the private ips are determined by what private ip the router starts with, and that is in the instruction booklet of the router. Like i said, the router will prolly be 192.168.2.1. Just make when you assign the private ips you keep them in the same IP network. In english that means just keep the first 3 numbers that are separated by dots the same, such as 192.168.2. So assuming your router starts with the 192.168.2.1, the first address you would give to a any PC on your network would be 192.168.2.2, then the next computer or server would be 192.168.2.3 and so on. Well i hope i made this clear enough to where you understand it, if you dont ill try to clear it up for you
Hope this helps, -andy
They should make a brand of clothing called Cisco Router and Switch... Yah, that beats the hell out of Ambercrombie and whatever...