3. Setup and Administration, Continued

After the upgrades, I reset the box and made configuration changes via the web-based interface. As you can see below, the SMC2804WBRP-G supports a number of WAN connection options, including Dynamic IP Address, PPPoE, PPTP, L2TP, static IP addressing, and if you happen to live in Australia you can "put another prawn on the barbie" while you hook up to BigPond.

Figure 4: Manual WAN setup options

I chose PPPoE and put in the account name and password provided to me by my ISP. You will note below that it is also possible to tweak your maximum transmission unit (MTU) size, which can potentially increase (or impact) the performance of your connection to the Internet.

Figure 5: PPPoE provides the ability to change frame size

Configuration settings also make it easy to set a time zone. By default, SMC helps you select a network time protocol (NTP) server to keep your time stamps accurate.

Figure 6: NTP helps to keep your logs synchronized

I was also able to change the IP address of the router, to match the IP address scheme that I use on the rest of my network. This saved me from having to re-IP other devices on the network, such as network attached storage servers. SMC also allows several configurations for DHCP lease time in increments from one-half hour to forever.