Hi,
I have just spent over a hour with BT technical support before they ran out of ideas and gave up.
We are a small one office company with six PC's and a few printes etc on a LAN. Having run a D Link router for several years without problem we decided to upgrade (not) to a BT Business Hub router to refresh the equipment.
For background our system runs with each PC having a manually specified IP address. The email is collected by one of the PC's from an external site, distributed into mailboxes on its hard drive and all the other PC's collect their email from these mailboxes. We specify the IP addresses and DNS servers in the TCP/IP setting box on each PC and point the email clients to the IP address for the PC with the mailboxes on its hard drive. The router address in our case ended .0.20 and this was the default gateway.
We have run like this for years without problems, everything works and indeed we are back to the D Link with this set up now.
The business hub ran fine if all TCP/IP settings were changed to automatic. Unfortunatly this has the effect of automatically assigning new IP addresses to all the PC's so the email system and few if any of the shared drivers would work. All we needed to do it seemed was assign the router a fixed IP address so we could used our established settings and everything would work again.
Turns out this is not possible. I tried and failed, assumed it was me being thick so called BT and they tried for over an hour with no success at all.
Our choices were to use the BT Hub, have functioning internet but no emal, limited or no access to shared resources and hardly any of the periferal devices working or no internet.
Not much of a choice! We went baack to the D Link and everything is working just fine again.
So much for an upgrade. I can't believe that we are the only little company using a small LAN with static IP addressing, there must be thousands in our situation and the Hub is completly useless in this situation. Worse than useless in fact as its wasted half a day of my time!!
Be warned, if your set up is in any way like ours the Business Hub will not work. Save yourself some time and frustration and buy a router which can be given a static IP address (more or less every other router on the market as far as I can tell) You have been warned!!! BT should know this issues and warn people in my view.
Good luck.
