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

[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!