This is possible because the system board on my PC has two Ethernet NICs. One NIC is connected directly to my ADSL router/modem/switch for direct Internet access. The second NIC is connected directly to the SG300 switch for my private network. This is necessary as the default subnet for the ADSL router/modem/switch is 192.168.2.0/24 and the default subnet for the SG300 switch is 192.168.1.0/24. I'm in too much of a hurry change the configuration so that both switches are on the same subnet, and I'm not sure I would want to.
The obvious question is what am I doing for routing? Even though the SG300 switch is capable of being configured for static routes I'm opting to use virtual routers on NODE 1. I would have like to have the version of the switch which includes RIP routing, but that more than doubled the price. My choice of virtual routers at this point are: (1) Zebra on Red Hat Linux or the current equivalent, or (2) GNS3 or something equivalent. I have already have prior experience with Zebra on Linux for an earlier lab and it worked exactly the way I wanted. GNS3 is compelling due to the opportunity to get my hands dirty with Cisco routing to complement the Cisco switch work.
BTW, those aren't the real cable colours.
