Tuesday, February 21, 2006
« Yet more Remote Desktop goodness.... | Main | Networking woes solved... man I over com... »

I'll start this post by saying, I have not googled this yet, nor have I really applied a ton of effort to solve this problem. I figured that someone may have had experience in doing what I'd like to do with my home network.

With a bunch of different devices that need TCP/IP internet connectivitiy, and some different hardware mixed in, I'm challenged to solve this problem. Any help from anyone would be great. I'm really looking for the settings I'd need to input into the two routers, specifics.

So the problem is I have two routers each on their own network, a wired 192.168.1.1, and a wireless access point 192.168.2.1. Now you may ask, why not just have a wireless network? Two reasons, reason 1: Where my cable modem is located is probably the worst place in my entire house as far as wireless coverage goes, reason 2: I needed more than 4 ports on my router to plug into.

So my solution at the time was an 8 port wired router, plugged into one of the ports a fair distance away is my wireless router, in a location that services my wireless devices as I needed. See the diagram below, and please post any ideas/solutions you have.

Again, the goal is to get all the devices on a unified network 192.168.1.1, while still allowing my wireless access point to hand out addresses as needed to devices that connect w/ the proper WEP and security credentials. If you have any ideas on what I can do, please post specifics in the comments section!

Thanks!


 connection.jpg

(Click Image for larger version)

Wednesday, February 22, 2006 5:01:58 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Nice diagram!
Anyway, I had the same problem where I have two routers, one wireless and one wired. I previously had a NetGear Wifi router that did both, but I really wanted AirTunes so I replaced it with a Linksys wired router and an Airport Express Base Station. I specifically did not want two networks, since my XBox (wired) needed to connect to my desktop (wireless) in order to play my movies.

Basically what you need to do is disable the routing features of the wireless router, and use it only as an access point. I'm not sure that all wireless routers expose the necessary options for this, but the Aiport Express does, and it's their stripped down base station. In order to do this, I had to change two settings:
- Distribute IP Addresses (DHCP Server) set to OFF
- Network Address Translation (NAT) set to OFF

Without these two things enabled, the base station behaves only as an access point, and leaves the routing and network creation up to the wired router to which it is attached. Again, it depends on your wireless router exposing the options necessary.

On a related note, I'm looking to replace my Linksys wired router, and I need one that does QoS and DHCP reservations. Does yours do that?
Wednesday, February 22, 2006 8:56:23 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
No. But you should keep your linksys, it can do it. Read more here.....
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ do a search for linksys, and see several posts about changing the linksys firmware.

He also devoted a 30+ minute podcast about hacking your linksys. It can totally do QoS. http://www.hanselminutes.com/

Thanks for the suggestions, maybe I need to replace my wireless router w/ one that will do what you're suggesting. I don't know if I can disable NAT, I know I can turn off DHCP, but not sure about NAT.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006 12:34:42 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I haven't read it yet, but I'm relatively confident I know what it'll say. He's probably talking about a very hackable Linksys router than can be flashed to run Linux. I've read all about it and lusted after it, but that is not my model :-(
The hackable model is a WiFi + Wired router, and I don't want another Wireless network in my house -- the Airport Express can only expand certain types of Wireless networks
Wednesday, February 22, 2006 1:33:39 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Ahhhhh you are correct.

That is the model he refers too. I wish mine had QoS. Would ne nice to have that feature.... I think I can specify a hard wired port that can take precedence, so any traffic going to switch port '2' can be priority... I'll have to look now.
Friday, February 24, 2006 10:04:45 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Hi Jo(h)ns...

John, what Jon and I just realized is this: the Linksys BEFSR81 is a hunk of utter garbage. The QoS settings won't actually help for most situations, and the router has other major issues that Linksys is unlikely to fix. I summarized it all on my site here:

http://www.chuma.org/index.php/2006/02/23/guess-what-the-router-is-crap/
Name
E-mail
Home page

Comment (HTML not allowed)  

Enter the code shown (prevents robots):