I know everyone out there uses only one router for their networking needs. Before you go and think that I am stupid of doing this, let me explain my reasons first. Originally, we used only one wireless router, the D-Link DI-524 wireless router. The router worked great, but I had one flaw. Whenever I used my BitTorrent client to download torrents, it would flood the router to the point where internet browsing completely stopped. Now I know you can limit the number of connections per torrent file to avoid this problem. But I love the fast speeds of torrents and to achieve that, I cannot limit the number of connections. So anyways, I came across another D-Link router, the DI-604 wired router. Now running torrents on this router, there is no problem. No flooding and internet browsing works like a charm. Now I still need wireless access at my apartment, so I asked around that if I can connect both the wired and wireless router together. Everyone said "it's easy, just plug and go". Now after doing that, it did not work. I don't think it is that easy. So I started surfing the net and found some documentation helping me achieve my goal. I'm going to list the steps I did to make this work for me, so just use these steps as guidelines, but I'm sure this can work for any router.
My primary router is the DI-604 wired router. This router is directly connected to my ISP modem. The DI-524 wireless router is my secondary router. NOTE: make sure that both routers also have built-in switches. If not, I don't think this will work. Now, since I have two routers, I have to convert one into a switch that will connect to the primary router. This pretty much expands the network, giving you more wired ports and also wireless access.
Primary Router (DI-604) Steps:
- No additional configuration is needed. Just follow the simple out-of-box instructions to configure the router for internet access.
Secondary Router (DI-524) Steps:
- Do not connect this router to the primary router just yet, we first need to do some configuration.
- Connect to the DI-524 router, accessing its configuration settings.
- Under the WAN settings, select Static IP Address for the WAN port. We want to make this static since this router is not going to receive internet from the WAN port. WAN is only connected to the primary router. So we need the router not to randomly search for a WAN connection. To achieve this, we enter invalid I.P. address that will make the router not look for a WAN connection. Take a look at the screenshot and fill in the the same information.
- Make sure to enter the primary routers MAC address. This will make the secondary router find the primary router easily, not making the secondary router slow. The MAC address is usually a sticker under the router, just take a look and see.
- Under the DHCP settings, we need to disable DHCP server. The reason behind this is that the DHCP server is responsible for leasing out I.P. addresses to anyone that connects to the router. Now, if you want both routers to work under the same network, you need to disable the DHCP server on the secondary router. This will then make the primary router lease out I.P. addresses anyone connected to the secondary router. Take a look at the screenshot.
- Under the LAN settings, we need to assign a I.P. address to the secondary router. Now by default, all routers come with the default I.P. address either 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1. Now two routers with the same I.P. address will create a conflict and also make it harder to configure each router separately in the near future. Now the D-Link routers come with the following default I.P. address, 192.168.0.1. Now since we did not make any changes to the primary router, we need to change the I.P. address of the secondary router. For the secondary router, I made the default I.P. address 192.168.0.2.
- And that is it. now the last thing you have to do is connect one port of the primary router to any port of the secondary router. Remember, not the WAN port. Then just wait and the secondary router will pick the primary router's DHCP server and now you got 2 routers connected together, providing both wired and wireless access. Now if you still don't understand what I did, here is the link that I followed. Enjoy!
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