Re: piggybacking a wireless router on a another router, and DHCP

I always get an education from you guys!

On 6/5/06, David Gibbs <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Did you mean to say that you hooked it up to the "WAN" port on the new
> WRT54GC?  My connection was a LAN port from the old (main) router to the
WAN
> port on the new router.

No, not the WAN port.  I hooked up to the LAN port.  If you hook up to
the WAN port you are creating a separate network, probably in it's own
subnet.

That is correct.  My main concern with my limited time resources on
Saturday, which was just too gorgeous outside to spend more than 10 minutes
indoors, much less the time it would take me to set this up properly, was
simply to get to the internet from any device on either of the two routers.
I got that far.

The key is to make sure the wireless AP's IP has a different IP than the

>> router, but is in the same subnet.
> The old (main) router's address is 192.168.8.1 and the new router's is
> 192.168.0.1, so I guess I avoid address conflicts that way.

Yes, but you probably can't access network resources on the 192.168.8
subnet.

Didn't try this; I don't do much networking "in-house".  Don't have a
bona-fide file server, and there have only been a few times that we have
ever had a "need" to access a file across the network.  My bigger need is to
share the printers, but that's another day.

If you hookup to a LAN port, and disable the dlink's dhcp server, you

will be on the main router's network (which is what I assume you want to
do).

OK, I think I get this.  I thought the D-Link tech was recommending I
disable DHCP on the Gigafast (could be wrong on that).  So, just to be
clear, you are recommending disabling the DHCP server on the D-Link, which
is *not* the router directly connected to the cable modem?  (Or does it
matter which one?)  For clarification, here is my "schematic":

    Cable modem
         ||
         ||
       \ || /
        \||/
         \/
    Gigafast router ===> PC w/ Win98SE
         ||        \===> PC w/ WinXP
         ||        \===> PC w/ Win98SE
       \ || /
        \||/
         \/
    D-Link DI-524  ===> PC w/ WinXP
                  \===> PC w/ WinXP (wireless)

But what was the deal with the D-Link tech instructing me to disable DHCP?

By disabling DHCP on the dlink, and making the two routers work on the
same subnet, the two routers won't assign conflicting IP's.

OK.

Per Tom's suggestion on getting wireless encryption running:  I set up
128-bit WEP, but it looks like I should be using WPA instead, according to a
few articles I just pulled up.  Advice on that?

TIA,
Dan