Hey what's up. I need help deciding on proper network layout. My connection is a business class DSL. The DSL modem has 4 port switch or router built in. I don't know which since only the AT&T can telnet into the DSL modem. After the modem we have a Watchguard SOHO firewall, again, w/ 4 port router. Then there's a unmanaged 36 port switch. There are 10 systems and 2 printers on the network connected to a switch. One of the systems is a Windows 2000 server which serves as a domain controller. We have 5 public IP addresses, let's say they are *.*.*.1 - *.*.*.5. The DSL modem itself has one of those addresses. Let's say *.*.*.1. The Watchguard SOHO firewall has *.*.*.2 as public IP and 192.168.111.1 as internal IP. There are 2 DNS were provided to us on a specific public IP's. Let's say *.*.*.98 & *.*.*.99.

My original idea was to configure the SOHO firewall on static external and static DNS server. I wanted to use the SOHO's DHCP server to give out everyone IP's in a 192.168.111.10 - 192.168.111.20 range. This would point them to a AT&T DNS servers as well. Clients could connect to the Internet just fine.

I realized that the problem is that the clients don't respect the internal network DNS and couldn't recognize their internal domain server which I wanted to keep static on 192.168.111.2 since the SOHO was already internal 192.168.111.1.

My solution to this problem was to configure the SOHO for a provided static DNS but make the DHCP on SOHO make clients point to 192.168.111.2 which was the internal domain server. The clients would resolve their internal IP's first and then go to server's default gateway, which was SOHO and that would take them to the Internet.

For some reason this doesn't seem like a good idea. It works but it really ****ed up the network which is really slow. Can you pls help with what would be a better design.

Should I even have the server plugged into the switch. Why not plug it into the SOHO??

Help