General Question

afghanmoose's avatar

How do i tunnel two routers together?

Asked by afghanmoose (554points) December 8th, 2008

i bought recently a cisco N router thinking it would extend the range of my wifi in order to connect wirelessly to my mac mini. Problem is that it does connect but still not what i wanted. So i heard that if i use my old netgear rangemax G router to my cisco N router and connnect the netgear one to a power outlet near my mac mini so it would catch some wifi and help increase the range. I dont know if its true or not but if it is can anyone help?

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4 Answers

benseven's avatar

What I did:

I needed Wifi access at both ends of our flat, but there was thick walls at the inside of the L shaped layout that stopped it from getting through.

For this to work, you’ll pick a ‘master’ router and a ‘slave’ – the master handling the connection to the internet and the overall network, the slave merely creates another wireless network and bridges it to the master network.

What that means: I set up our main router (I’d pick the better router i.e the Cisco N) as normal, then ran an ethernet cable under the carpet up to the other end of the flat from one of the ethernet ports, into a port on the ‘slave’ router. Before plugging in the ethernet to the slave, I plugged a computer into the slave router and used this to configure it (via its web based interface, typically at the address 192.168.1.1).

I then set it to have a static IP address (I knew the other router was 192.168.1.1) of 192.168.1.2, so I could always tell them apart and remember the addresses for configuring them. In terms of the configuration of the slave, I merely had to disable its DHCP server, and set up the wifi as preferred (SSID, password etc).

As far as I remember, that was all it took to have a second wifi network existing on essentially the same internet and network connection.

afghanmoose's avatar

So from the cable modem u connected the master router to it and from the master u connected the slave to it? It picks up my N router now but the problem is that its not strong enough thus me using the second router.how do i connect the slave to use the same wifi connection

benseven's avatar

You can’t connect the slave to use the same Wifi connection. Most routers are created to host a wifi network, not connect to one.

Sounds like what you need is something like a Wireless Bridge which connects to an existing wifi network and shares it with devices over ethernet. Get one of these, configure and plug in near your Mac Mini, running a network cable into the mini, and you’re done. Alternatively I believe an Apple Airport Express can be configured to do the same thing, for one ethernet device – connects to existing Wifi network and share network over ethernet.

Unfortunately, either way, you can’t use your existing ‘old’ router as a bridge. My suggestion involved running a cable through the house to nearer the Mac Mini, and running a second wifi network for the same Internet connection and network backbone there.

RickZamo's avatar

Well, I called my ISP and they changed the settings of my Voip Router ( Patton Smartlink 4022) so it´s no longer giving the IP addresses but my AirPort Express is still flashing the amber light. I know it´s working because if a disconnect the AirPort Extreme and use it as a base it works just fine… any ideas?

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