Ya they ended up on the right track there…but you can use a switch....in this case here he had a 2950...He could have had anything setup on that switch, even without him knowing. who knows, whoever had the switch may have had 2 different Vlans or even some ACL's (access control lists, basically a manual firewall for a switch of that type) on it...It could have been several different issues. I didn't see this post earlier, I probably could have helped. Nonetheless it should have worked, my bet was a configuration error on the cisco switch. That's an enterprise class switch and not some soho linksys or dlink type. It has much more things you can configure than a home or office router/switch.