cascading two routers and few questions regarding their working

arun_kumar

Honorable
Oct 12, 2013
20
0
10,510
Hello Everyone,
Firstly let me explain my situation to you.
I live in a 2 floor house ,where in the first floor i have stationed my main router(Netgear D6000)
from the main router i have two LAN cables ,
One of which is going the ground floor,the other to the 2nd floor.

On the second floor I have my gaming rig,which has a wired internet connection from the main router.The PC is also a media server where in i share files to any device connected to my network.

On the ground floor,i have an old belkin N300 router,which is connected to the main router via the LAN cable.The belkin router is cascaded to my main netgear router to act as an access point.I have never cascaded two routers but i think i did it correctly as i am able to access internet from one of the routers LAN ports.
Can someone please confirm my settings before i proceed further,if i am missing something please mention it.
1.On the secondary router: change the ip address so that it does not clash with my main router.
2.Turn off DHCP server on the secondary router.


My main netgear router also have two wireless networks setup(lets call them ak-2.3 and ak-5.0)
Now if i setup a wireless network on the my secondary network with the same details of ak-2.3(same SSID,same password,same security encryption..etc),
If i connect to the secondary router wireless-ly,would it be the same wireless network of the original ak-2.3 from the netgear router?
And would i be able to access the media server on my gaming rig,from the secondary belkin router's wireless network?




 
Solution
You have it all setup correctly assuming you are using the a lan port on the belkin router to connect back to the main router.

The SSID you use on the belkin does not matter it will be on the same network no matter what you set it too. Some people actually want to make it a different network which is not possible.

Using the same of different SSID is a matter of personal preference there are advantages and disadvantages...mostly related to roaming which does not work too well even when it works.

You may want to force your router to use 20mhz channels on the 2.4g band and then set the channels to not over lap. Ie set one to 1 and the other to 11. If you leave it at 40mhz you are stick with the problem of using channels 1&6 or...
You have it all setup correctly assuming you are using the a lan port on the belkin router to connect back to the main router.

The SSID you use on the belkin does not matter it will be on the same network no matter what you set it too. Some people actually want to make it a different network which is not possible.

Using the same of different SSID is a matter of personal preference there are advantages and disadvantages...mostly related to roaming which does not work too well even when it works.

You may want to force your router to use 20mhz channels on the 2.4g band and then set the channels to not over lap. Ie set one to 1 and the other to 11. If you leave it at 40mhz you are stick with the problem of using channels 1&6 or 6&11. There is only 60mhz total so you can not fit 2 40mhz signals with no overlap. It may not matter if the signal is very weak between the 2 areas.
 
Solution

arun_kumar

Honorable
Oct 12, 2013
20
0
10,510

Thanks for the reply bill,i did as you mentioned above,also i assigned same wireless settings to both the routers and its working beautifully.

Now that that's cleared,i would like to have a wireless AP on the second floor also,is it a good idea to buy a cheap router and cascade it also to my main netgear router?
Or would it just be easier to turn my gaming rig into a Wifi hotspot for the second floor.?


 
Unless money is a huge issue i never use a pc as a router/ap unless you are going to dedicate it to that purpose.

A gaming machine in particular is a extremely bad choice to do that with. Network traffic from other device need priority action from your machine to not disrupt their connection. You end up with the network traffic degrading your game or your game degrading the network traffic since both are dependent on extremely tight timing constraints.