Crazy home wifi setup - need some help here

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prasvt

Gawd
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Dec 8, 2005
Messages
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So check this out...Our house (which is about 2 years old) has very thick walls and with our N router, it's been tough to get a good signal everywhere. To complicate matters, because we have dish network hd for tv, the one cable line is coming in from the garage. So, for a while, the only way to get our D-Link Dir-655 N router upstairs was to use a pair of Linksys powerline adapters - which by the way work beautifully w/ our 16mbit comcast service. BUT, my dad's weak-ass T61 Thinkpad seems to drop his cisco vpn connection (we both work for cisco). Anyway, so before today the connection was like this:


cable modem --> downstairs powerline adapter --> upstairs powerline adapter --> router

NOW it's:

cable modem --> downstairs dir-655 router --> downstairs powerline adapter --> upstairs powerline adapter --> DGL - 4300 router (w/ 7dbi antenna).

It works fine. I have 2 wireless networks 1 for downstairs and 1 for upstairs. They're on different channels w/ different names. The internet works and using speedtest.net via wireless I'm getting 20mbit down and 3mbit up which is excellent.

Now the only complaint I have is that I can't connect to VPN via network 2. I turned off the DHCP server on the upstairs router, but it still assigned a subnet-local IP to my laptop.

ie. Downstairs router is 192.168.0.1 and the upstairs router is 192.168.1.1

Also, the upstairs router's IP for the downstairs subnet is reserved and it is the DMZ.

Turning off DHCP server in the upstairs router didn't seem to help. It still assigned a 192.168.1.xxx IP instead of a 192.168.0.xxx IP.

My question is, is there a way to allow the downstairs router to assign ips to the computers connected wirelessly to the upstairs router? I figure that would alleviate my vpn probs.

Ultimately it's not a big deal b/c I can probably connect to the downstairs router on my laptop ..just figured the setup would be more versatile.

Anyway if any of you networking gurus can give me insight or tips on how to configure my setup here so maybe I could use my VPN through the upstairs connection I'd appreciate it.

I just hooked everything up like 30 min ago so I haven't really exhausted all the options yet.
 
Well to answer my own question and possibly help others who want to use 2 wireless routers on the same network, I'll post my solution - because I did get it to work. The powerline networking part is pretty minor because those things are plug and play.

The main wireless router is the D-Link DIR-655 and it's connected to the cable modem downstairs. One of the outputs of the router is connected to one of the outputs on the upstairs DGL-4300 wireless router (via the powerline adapters) - NOT the WAN input. The DIR-655 IP is 192.168.0.1 and it's DHCP range is 192.168.0.2 - 192.168.0.50. With the upstairs router disconnected, I set it's IP to 192.168.0.51 and then turned off DHCP so it's on the same subnet as the downstairs router. Also, I had WPA2/WPA on the downstairs router so I replicated that setting on the upstairs router, set the wireless settings and a different SSID. Then I connected the ethernet cable back to one of the inputs on the upstairs router and voila!

The downstairs 655 assigns LAN ips to the wireless clients connected to both routers so the upstairs router is acting like simple access point I guess. More importantly, my Cisco VPN works now!

I was using a D-Link wireless repeater before and those things aren't particularly reliable..latency issues, drops, etc.

Anyway, so each floor has excellent coverage now - I swear it took me a year to find a viable solution. We actually have ethernet ports in every room and there's a control box (onQ brand) in the master bedroom closet. I tried connecting the router to every rj45 port on it but didn't seem to work in any room so not sure how that is supposed to work.
 
Just turn off the routing functionality on the upstairs 'router' and just use it as an AP...
 
Well you're partly right. You have to remember not to use the input port on the second router, otherwise it will still work but you'll have two different subnets. When the 2nd router is getting an ip from the first router, you can't set the second router's internal ip to be anything in the same subnet. So if you do it independently then you can set it. Of course I'm not sure what would happen if you connected the 2nd router via it's input port after that...I'm guessing one or both routers would complain.

Anyway, having one subnet allows VPN to work.
 
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