router help

[gilana]

I just bought a wireless router, so that my boyfriend can play networked games on his Nintendo DS and I can get better quality on streaming Netflix on my iPhone.  I already have a wired router in place for our cable modem in the living room, and I had hoped to daisy chain this one on in my bedroom, since I'm not sure the signal would be strong enough from the living room.  Turns out that you can't just plug it in with the default settings and have that work, though, and I don't know enough about networking to make sense of the solutions I'm finding online.  Anyone out there willing to help walk me through it?  Thanks!

Comments

[ckd]

I suspect what you want to do is put it into "bridge" mode, where it basically just forwards Ethernet frames between the wired and wireless sides. That way everything will talk to the existing wired router.

[gilana]

OK... any idea how I figure out how to do that? :)

[kelkyag]

Does it give any interface instructions? I imagine you need to plug it in to the same (wired?) network as one of your computers, and connect to it with a web browser at a non-routable IP address which should be in the documentation, and then it will give you a set of configuration screens.

[gilana]

Yeah, I can get to the configuration screen just fine, it's a matter of knowing what I need to put into it, since it's not just the usual default setup.

[kelkyag]

Sorry, I wasn't sure where you were getting wedged. Somewhere in the configuration screens should be the aforementioned 'bridge' option, though it might not be phrased quite that way. Without being able to see said configuration information or look up the configuration screens for that (unspecified) router, more difficultdetailed instructions are difficult to give.

[gilana]

There's an emulator for it online here -- if you're willing to take a quick look and see if you can quickly find that option, I'd greatly appreciate it! (Of course I did look myself first, but there are an awful lot of options and I'm not even sure where I should be looking.) Thanks so much.

[kelkyag]

I'm not finding anything that looks like exactly what I want, but try under Setup / Network Settings disabling "Enable DHCP Server". The defaults on both your existing router and the wireless router are probably to enable DHCP. If you tell the wireless router not to hand out addresses, I expect it will pass through the DHCP data from the existing router, letting it assign addresses to machines on wireless.

[gilana]

Hmm. When I try that, I get the error "LAN subnet conflicts with WAN subnet" and it won't let me save the settings.

[kelkyag]

What do you have under setup / internet / "My Internet Connection is"? And under setup / network settings / Router IP Address? I'm not finding something obvious-to-me to disable NAT, which I'm assuming it's doing, but I may be wrong.

[gilana]

"My Internet Connection is" is set to "Dynamic IP (DHCP)" and Router IP Address is 192.168.0.1. I can send screenshots, if that's helpful at all.

[kelkyag]

Try changing the Router Address to 192.168.0.2, or if you can talk to the existing router, check whether it also thinks it's 192.168.0.1. You'll also need to change the URL you're pointing to talk to the wireless router if you do that. (La la la, it has a 'reset' button, right?)

[gilana]

The existing router does think it's at 192.168.0.1. But I tried changing the router address on the wireless one before and got the same "LAN subnet conflicts with WAN subnet" with any value I tried to change it to.

(And yes, it has a reset button :)

[kelkyag]

What addresses have you tried? How about 192.168.1.1? (That is, move it to a different subnet -- does the other router also have a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0?

(I'm about to run off, but will come back and poke at this further if it hasn't been sorted out in a couple of hours.)

[gilana]

Hmm... just tried that, and it let me put in the values and save them, then had me reboot the router. But when it came back up I couldn't connect to it at the new IP address.

Tried pinging it, and I got:
PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1): 56 data bytes
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2
Request timeout for icmp_seq 3


I tried pinging the old router and got:
PING 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1): 56 data bytes
ping: sendto: Host is down
ping: sendto: Host is down
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
ping: sendto: Host is down
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
ping: sendto: Host is down
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2

Dunno if that's useful info... Thanks som uch for your continued help, I'll keep you posted if I figure anything out in the meantime!

(Oh, and the other router is also a D-Link, and seems to have most of the same presets, so yes to the subnet mask.)

[kelkyag]

Alternately, you may need to change setup / network settings / router IP address -- I would not be surprised if the existing router also uses 192.168.0.1. Ideally you'd then tell the existing router to reserve whatever address you use so it doesn't try to hand that out to some other device as a DHCP address.

[beowabbit]

OK, if your router has a group of ports labelled LAN, and one separate port labelled WAN or UPLINK or something like that, and you have your other router plugged into the WAN/UPLINK port, try moving it to one of the LAN ports. The concept here would be that you are using the wireless router, but you're not using its actual routing functionality (routing = taking network packets from one network and routing them to another network), just its ability to bridge the local-area wired network to wireless. This is actually the configuration I have my wireless router in, since I have a separate firewall gadget that serves as a wired router.

If your wireless router doesn't have any wired LAN ports, you may be out of luck with the configuration you're looking for, but most of them do have some. (Although it should still be able to come up with a network topology that works for wireless; just with a useless additional routing step.)

(You may also need to configure the wireless router to use an arbitrary static IP address on the WAN port; no traffic will actually go over that since nothing is plugged into it, but the router might complain if it's not configured. 10.0.0.2 might be a good choice for an IP address for that port, since it's a non-routable address in a different range from the one you're using on the local network. If you can just leave it unconfigured, though, that's fine.)

[beowabbit]

Ah, I found photos! Yeah, I'm guessing you currently have your other router plugged into the "Internet" port. Try plugging it into one of the blue-labelled "LAN" ports.

[gilana]

Oh, interesting! I think that might be working... at least, I have it plugged in that way now and I'm getting internet on my desktop computer, and my iphone seems to be connected to the wireless network.

The only issue is that I can't seem to connect to the wireless router to configure anything; I had to reset it to make this work after having changed the IP address before, so now http://192.168.0.1/ brings up the config page for the old wired router, where originally it had been defaulting to bringing up the new one.

Maybe if I plug it back into the internet port and change it, then go back to this configuration?

But huge huge progress, thank you!

[gilana]

Nope, still can't get to the config. But hey, it's working, that's awesome.

[beowabbit]

The only issue is that I can't seem to connect to the wireless router to configure anything; I had to reset it to make this work after having changed the IP address before, so now http://192.168.0.1/ brings up the config page for the old wired router, where originally it had been defaulting to bringing up the new one.

Maybe if I plug it back into the internet port and change it, then go back to this configuration?

Yup, I’d expect that to work (probably with a power-cycle before trying to connect).

Also, most likely what’s going on is that the wireless router has gotten a random LAN IP address from the wired router and is using it, so you could try going to http://192.168.0.2/, ...0.3/, ...0.4/, and so on, and see if one of those is the wireless router. (You can skip any IP addresses that you know to be other things, e.g., the current IP address of your desktop computer and your iPhone.) But if you don’t find it quickly, what you suggest will probably work. (And it shouldn't be necessary to plug anything into the wireless router except the laptop or desktop you're trying to configure it from.)

Good luck!

[kelkyag]

Yay!

[the-gadgetman.livejournal.com]

Looking over that emulator you referenced, as well as some quick web searching, it appears that particular device isn't intended to work as a pure access point. So it looks like it won't do what you want (which I have to say is rather lame on DLink's part).

[gilana]

Well dang. Thanks, that's certainly helpful info, if not the answer I was hoping for :)