Yes, it can be done. In fact, should be done if you have a reasonably large house. Here was my problem: My network connection (cable modem) comes into my basement on one side of my house and I connect a wireless router to it as any home user would.
To this router, I have the usual things connected; my wife and I both have laptops, I have a home server with lots of media shared from it and a home theater pc hooked to my big flatscreen and a TiVo with a wireless adapter in the bedroom.
The home theater pc (htpc) and the laptops are the real culprits here. I use my laptop just about everywhere in the house and my wife uses hers most often in the bedroom which is on the complete opposite side of the house, maybe 100 feet, two floors and 3 walls away from the router. Needless to say, the signal strength is around 10% at best by the time it reaches the bedroom.
I fixed part of the problem by running a wired line to the htpc in the living room, directly below the master bedroom. I also had a second wireless G router kicking around and decided there HAS to be a way to get a double router, one on each side of the house, thereby getting full strength signals everywhere.
This situation is easily implemented by simply plugging in the old router into a lan port of the main router and setting it to operate on a second network. The problem I was having was that this didn't allow any device operating from the second router to access anything that was connected to the primary router.
After some research and thinking about it, I worked out how to get things working...
Voilla, two or more wireless routers, all on the same network.
To this router, I have the usual things connected; my wife and I both have laptops, I have a home server with lots of media shared from it and a home theater pc hooked to my big flatscreen and a TiVo with a wireless adapter in the bedroom.
The home theater pc (htpc) and the laptops are the real culprits here. I use my laptop just about everywhere in the house and my wife uses hers most often in the bedroom which is on the complete opposite side of the house, maybe 100 feet, two floors and 3 walls away from the router. Needless to say, the signal strength is around 10% at best by the time it reaches the bedroom.
I fixed part of the problem by running a wired line to the htpc in the living room, directly below the master bedroom. I also had a second wireless G router kicking around and decided there HAS to be a way to get a double router, one on each side of the house, thereby getting full strength signals everywhere.
This situation is easily implemented by simply plugging in the old router into a lan port of the main router and setting it to operate on a second network. The problem I was having was that this didn't allow any device operating from the second router to access anything that was connected to the primary router.
After some research and thinking about it, I worked out how to get things working...
- Unplug the secondary router's WAN port if it is connected.
- Configure the secondary router to use an IP address outside of the DHCP allocation range of the primary router and obviously a different IP address than the primary router itself. I use 192.168.1.1 (primary) and 192.168.1.254 (secondary) with 192.168.1.100-200 allocated for DHCP.
- Configure the secondary router to NOT use DHCP. Two DHCP servers aren't a great idea, so make sure to disable one.
- Plug in a cable from the primary router's LAN port to the secondary router's LAN port. This is very important...and I managed to mess it up several times. :-)
- Reboot the secondary router if necessary and renew IP addresses on any hardware that was connected to the secondary router originally.
Voilla, two or more wireless routers, all on the same network.
Hi, cool post. I have been thinking about this issue,so thanks for posting. I'll certainly be coming back to your blog. Keep up the good posts
ReplyDeleteHi, good post. I have been woondering about this issue,so thanks for posting. I’ll definitely be coming back to your site.
ReplyDelete