Home network...

[Saryn]

So, my previous ISP went belly up and bankrupt. What I liked with them was that I had internet access point in my living room, office and bedroom so essentially wired internet in every room without the need of a router. I did have two wireless routers though. Worked great. Now it doesn't.

Now I have ADSL setup in the office. The bedroom and living room are currently internet free. The office has the ADSL netgear modem and a Dlink DIR-655 wireless gaming router. The living room has a netgear n600 dual band wireless router. Both routers I got heavily discounted and work great.

My mission is to get the dlink hooked back up in the office getting internet off of the adsl netgear router and bridge it to the netgear in the living room so the netgear n600 will act as a AP for wired and wireless. How can I achieve this? I know some networking basics but this is a little beyond me.

Also, at first I had the adsl uplink port plugged into the WAN of the dlink and it seemed to work just fine.

[Blacksmith1]

That's your best bet, is to use the router direct wired from the DSL line. as for getting the other one to act as a wireless extender??? you would need to look at it's documentation to see if it can. the only way i know for sure to make it work is to use the DSL to driver router one, then configure router 2 to accept it's connection from router one. and then only wired. I never tried to make it work without the cables.

[Saryn]

Ok disabled the wifi on the Netgear DSL and plugged the dir655 from uplink to WAN and the dlink configured itself (pppoe and all). now the netgear n600 has a wireless repeater setting. I want to use the DLink as the base, and the netgear as the repeater/access point for lan and wireless. What settings on the netgear should be changed? First try was a fail. After I setup wireless repeater and input the dlink mac into the netgear, I couldnt access the netgear again so had to factory reset.

[Saryn]

dont think what I am trying to do is possible with a dlink and a netgear. Dlink doesnt have the option to be a base and am unsure how to connect the netgear wirelessly to the dlink. Gonna browse the netgear and dlink forums tomorrow to see what I can come up with.

btw, the n600 is wndr3400

[Joshua_Mahr]

Kinda over complicated. Why not use the DIR-655 for everything and leave out the n600. Or is it a range issue?

[Saryn]

Range issue and I have 5 devices in the living room, only two with wireless capability. The office is at one end of the house, the bedroom on the far other. Get a very weak signal down there and doesn't always work depending on what is running in the house. Looks like I will be looking for a range extender with lan capabilities for now. eventually going to run a cat5 or 6 from office to living room or a ethernet over powerline plug.

[Saryn]

I am thinking I will just give in and buy the cables and ends to run a cable to the netgear in the living room. Looking at about 50 foot of cable needed (over estimating as long as i dont have to cut too much from screwing up the crimping. The question now is, cat5e or 6? Where to buy from? What type of cable? I am seeing UTP, STp, flat, molded boot, crossover.

What my plan now is to run a cable from the LAN from the dlink to the living room. The wiring will be going underneath a modular so will be exposed to heat, cold, moisture, ect. What is the best option for this?

[Blacksmith1]

if you are 10/100 then use cat5e. if you have a gigabit lan then cat6. as for running the wire just put a pre made 50 footer in. save your self the hassle.

[Joshua_Mahr]

I use all cat7 now. I like the shielding. You can get it cheap from the egg.

[Saryn]

Didn't know 7 was already available. lol so behind on networking. I thought about running an already patched cable but im really trying to reduce the amount of holes in my house :P

[Saryn]

If I plug in the netgear in the living room this way, from lan on dlink to netgear, will the netgear be capable of wireless and wired?

[Blacksmith1]

You may have to go into it's property pages and manually setup the It's IP and such. i just loaned a linksys to a buddy and last night we set it up so that his router sends a static ip to the linksys, which is set to be that IP, and had to configure some other crap as well. It looks at the first router as the gateway and DNS server, so that IP was entered for those values. it now does wired and wireless with it's own SSID and wep key, but feeds the I-net right thru.

[Saryn]

I like the routers these days. So, I ordered 50ft of cat7 from newegg. just enough to run the wiring under the house. had an idea. plugged one end into a lan port on the dlink and other end into the wan of the netgears. Seems to work great. Also renamed the SSID and password on the netgear to match the dlink and wireless switches to the stronger signal after a few moments. Mission successful!

[Saryn]

I may end up modifying the netgear to work as an AP rather than its own router. It's nice having it wired in there, however it would be nice to access the NAS I have setup in there to stream media to the PS3 from my main computer.

[foxmobouser]

Its all do-able, but not painless and will require you to learn and read up on a bunch of stuff. Running cables through rooms is easy, less exciting and well can make your place more ugly. If you do decide to go without cables first thing you will need to check is weather there is dd-wrt firmware available for your router that you plan to use as a client-bridge. You will then need to flash your router with the dd-wrt firmware and set it up.