Test lab in an apartment with shared internet

[Guzinya]

I have an interesting and possibly hopeless situation I'm looking for some insight on.

There are two apartments in the house I live in - I live in one, my landlord lives in the other. He provides free Internet, but we share his router: cable comes into the house to the modem, goes to a router, one line runs to his computer, the other runs down to my apartment. I have a proliant that has a few servers virtualized on it, and I have an older PC I'd like to throw Untangle or IPCop on, just to have a firewall box play around with. Here is how I see the flow in my head:

Internet -> Landlord's Router -> Switch in my apartment -> Firewall Box -> Virtualized server farm

Is this even possible? I know connecting routers to routers is a bitch and become super problematic if you don't set up DHCP and other settings correctly, and I'm no guru. I've been trying to search for answers in situations similar to mine but so far have been unsuccessful. Thanks for any advice.

 

[AnotherUser]

The way I see it is you could do it like this:

Internet >Lanlords Router > [WAN (Receive DHCP or Setup Static Address) Firewall Box] - [LAN (DHCP Server) Firewall Box] - Apartment Switch - Server Farm

 

[XOR != OR]

Depends on your end goal; do you want your vms to have internet access? That shouldn't be too much work. Do you want to expose services to the internet on the public IP? That can be problematic.

Think of this like a company DMZ: You have an edge, public router with the public IP address on it. Then you have the DMZ network ( yours and your landlord's network ), then you have the internal network router + network ( your VMs ).

Providing internet access to your VMs should be relatively straight forward. Exposing a service on your VMs to the public network ( ie: internet )...well, then you have to do some work on the public router AND the internal router.

 

[Guzinya]

Depends on your end goal; do you want your vms to have internet access? That shouldn't be too much work. Do you want to expose services to the internet on the public IP? That can be problematic.

Think of this like a company DMZ: You have an edge, public router with the public IP address on it. Then you have the DMZ network ( yours and your landlord's network ), then you have the internal network router + network ( your VMs ).

Providing internet access to your VMs should be relatively straight forward. Exposing a service on your VMs to the public network ( ie: internet )...well, then you have to do some work on the public router AND the internal router.

Would DHCP on the Untangle box have to be disabled, or would that serve to hand out the "internal network" address pool?
VMs having internet access would be helpful, one VM is Ubuntu server which relies pretty heavily on internet access and I'd like to keep my Windows vms up to date.
I figured unless I had access to his router (haven't asked, but I'm sure he'd be a little weary as anyone should be) to set up something like an OpenVPN connection via Untangle, or a server for dedicated game hosting would be very difficult. I wouldn't mind setting up some sort DNS/AD server, but I don't know how well that would work.
I've been contemplating buying a house so I don't have to deal with this shit and I can just have my own network, so I can do with it what I please!

That makes a ton of sense though, so thanks for the reply.