Router unable to assign IP addresses to ports

Question

Alright, so I have a 2811 router in Packet Tracer 6.1,

I equipped it with what I thought were FastEthernet ports, even though it shows up when I'm cabling them as 'FastEthernetx/x'. **(The equipment being HWIC-4ESW)**

When I try to set an IPv4 address to said port all I see is something about VLAN?

The router I have needs 6 FastEthernet ports that can have IPv4 addresses.

It is rather frustrating because they only have around 2 default FastEthernet ports for use...

The network is currently under a star-topology, so there will be no problems connecting to destination if a link goes down.

I have tried to use this method to see if it does anything but I have no idea what I am doing:

int vlan 1
ip address 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0
no shut

I am assuming that has done something as when I checked the port status the IP was there.

I could place a switch in the fray and connect everything to a switch but that reduces reliability if the switch goes down then the whole network will not be able to connect to anything as the star topology will no longer be there.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The two onboard ports of the 2911 are routed ports so assigning them an IPv4 address is perfectly possible. The HWIC ports are layer 2 ports so you will not be able to assign them an IP address. They are not routed interfaces. What you would need to do is to assign the port (or ports) to a VLAN and then create a VLAN interface in which you will be able to assign an IP address.

Answer 2

You've assigned the network address (where all the bits not masked are zero) which is not allowed. For your subnet, the interface address can be anything OTHER than zero (the last 8 bits are all zero) or 255 (the last 8 bits are all ones). The most common convention is to have the router be the lowest numbered address of the IP block.

Try this:

int vlan 1
ip address 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0
no shut