> Thanks for suggestions, have been very useful > I would select: > 1. Pay for a network engineer. um-ahem. ;-> > 2. Pay for new routers and make a more complex design for > departments. Nah, a good layer-3 stack would do nicely. Of course, for 400 systems, that would be $5+K. Heck, if cost is a real issue, even a layer-3 tier-1 and a layer-2 tier-2 is doable. That would be far less costly. Remember, managed switches give you a lot of control over your network, especially routing with layer-3. It's cheaper than you think. > 3. just specify your network to be bigger than that. For > example > 192.168.0.0-192.168.1.255 gives you 510 hosts > 192.168.0.0/23 Yep, supernetting. > router-------PC with 2NICS--------Institute LAN > real IP 192.168.0.0-192.168.1.255 > 192.168.0.0/23 > Is supernetting available this way or can be used only > between routers? You don't need any routing if you're supernetting, other than to get to the Internet. If you're going to supernet, you might as well do 4+ class Cs, or move to a class B. I recommended supernetting because I assume you don't want to have to change IPs (only subnet masks). > Actually I am with the third, because of financial issues. Well, if you're buying equipment, you'd be surprised how little it costs to put a layer-3 GbE switch at the top. A layer-3 twelve (12) port GbE is sub-$1,000 these days. Underneath it you can use "dumb" layer-2 switches (just FE) with GbE uplinks and at least localize somethings. That's if you're trying to do it on the cheap. -- Bryan J. Smith Professional, Technical Annoyance b.j.smith at ieee.org http://thebs413.blogspot.com ---------------------------------------------------- *** Speed doesn't kill, difference in speed does ***