Two wireless routers & switching between them

[brittenmartin]

I have a router problem I simply cannot seem to crack. Here is the scenario ...

We are living in India for two years. To watch our US TV shows, I need to VPN into a US server. Got the cracked with StrongVPN (which is great for anyone out there needing that solution). I have a DSL wireless router from the local provider here which is connected to the internet. I want that router to be available for general connections. I have a Netgear router that I want to set up with a persistent VPN connection so devices that need a US IP (XBOX and Roku) can be persistently connected to it. I want our other devices (like our laptops) to be able to switch between the two routers depending on what we are doing. This seems like it should be rather easy, but I just cannot get it to work. The DSL router is fine (normal connections to the internet). How do I set the second router up?

Thanks,

 

[eibgrad]

It's not clear to me how you're currently configured. Should I assume the Netgear is configured w/ dd-wrt and using OpenVPN??

If that was the case, then what I would probably do is configure the Netgear as a "repeater" (not "repeater bridge"). This creates a virtual WAN between itself and the primary router (and thus has its own network (e.g., 192.168.2.x ), DHPC server, firewall, etc.) and establishes its own WAP, which should be configured w/ its own unique SSID to distinguish it from the primary router’s SSID. IIRC, when you configure StrongVPN as a client on the router, they provide a script that you install so that ALL your traffic is directed over the VPN.

So now all you have to do when you need to switch between the non-VPN vs. VPN connection is connect to the appropriate SSID (or if wired, use the appropriate router’s switch).