Forums | MacLife

Thanks for your reply. The gigabit connector is a switch, not a router. I connect through cable, as you guessed.

I have connected the cable modem to the switch, and then used one port for the computer, another for the Vonage (Linksys) box, which provides both wireless and telephone.

When both are connected this way, the Vonage router works, the iMac indicates a self-generated IP address and is not connected to the web, even though the connect light on the switch is lit and blinking.

I think that somehow the switch and the Vonage router are in conflict with each other. The web based set up of the Linksys router talks about setting up static routing, but the directions to do so are unclear.

Since the iMac connects to the wireless signal of the Linksys router with no problem, I could just forget the whole gigabit ethernet thing, but it bugs me that I can't make this work.

Any suggestions would be welcome!

Thanks.

All you need to do is, plug the modem into the "internet" port on the back of the vonage box.(the vonage box is an actual router)  Then plug the GB switch into the router via one of the ports labled 1-4, with the other end going into the "uplink) port of the switch if it has one, otherwise just use the last port on the switch.  Plug your iMac into one of the ports on the switch.  Theoretically, this will limit your connection to the speed of your router.  This will not make ANY difference because your router will limit it to 100Mb/s.  So unless you have a cable connection faster than that, which doesn't exist, you will not be limited by your vonage router.  The only way that gigabit switch will be any benefit is if you have other computers with gigabit ethernet connected to it and are sharing files between it and your iMac.  Then you will get much faster network transfers, but again, this setup is NOT limiting your internet connection.  Hope this helps.