[PLUG] Netgear FVX 538...

[plug_0 at robinson-west.com]

The way it has been set up is creating a nasty problem.  When it is used
to go to the Internet, private services aren't accessible.  When the
original system it is supposed to back up is used, that system doesn't
have the VPN capabilities that this fancy shmancy router does and since
I am developing the original system to a certain degree, reliability is
an issue.

So my natural thought to avoid the issue of grabbing the wrong network
line and putting it to the other system is to set things up differently
so that the choice of system can be made on the host side without
touching patch cables in the server room.  I want to be able to switch
back and forth between these systems in events where an outage is not  
necessarily the reason to do so.  These systems are supposed to be in
parallel and it is hoped that at least one of them will always work.
My headache is, dhcp can't be used by both systems over the same media  
simultaneously, can it?  Putting in a second physical network line and
manual switches host side is a prohibitively expensive solution.  I
want to put an end to people unplugging the mains like yesterday.
This is too error prone, especially with all the patch cables in
the server room being the same color.

What is DMZ and do I want to mess with that on the Netgear router?

What is done in the professional IT world when you want to run routers in
parallel and you want them both to be able to use dhcp to configure the
same hosts on the same media?  I want to be able to choose either  
system regardless of whether or not one of them has failed to some  
degree.

A brutal software approach is to write a replacement for dhcp that
runs on the original system complete with client side software so that a
person can decide whether or not they want to ignore dhcp from the  
Netgear router and favor information from the original system instead.  
  Is this
the way I have to go to get what I'm after?

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