Connect two router in one network

Question

I have 12+ users in a small company & we are having one Belkin modem+router normal one...Now whenever we having any guest or some vendors in our company. our current router is not supporting all connections...one or two users will not have connection...now as a option i have connected one netgear wifi router to the main Belkin router via lan cable & everything is working fine..but some users on Netgear (secondary) is having printer issue, they are not able to print & we are using lan messenger, that is also not working, i understand coz of different ips its not working, but there should be some workaround...

Pls help.

Answer 1

When you say "Now whenever we having any guest or some vendors in our company. our current router is not supporting all connections", how do you know this? Are they connecting via WiFi and it won't allow them to connect or is everyone cabled in and you are out of ports?

You shouldn't be using two routers in this setup.

You should be using the one router you have (or perhaps buying a better one if this isn't up to the task) and connecting a switch and/or access points to it.

You should be able to buy a 24 port gigabit unmanaged switch for a pretty good price and that should suit your requirements fairly well.

If it's just that the connection is too slow (i.e web pages are loading but taking forever) then you'll want to talk to your ISP about upgrading your plan.

I also agree with what davidgo said about your DHCP pool may be too small, pretty unlikely on a home router since they normally use /24 masks but you could try looking in your config and reporting to us what your subnet mask is.

You want something like the following diagram:

                                      +------------------+
                                      |                  |
                                      |      Router      |
                                      |                 <--+
                                      |                  | |
                                      +------------------+ |
                                                           |
                                      +-------------------+|
                                      |                   |+
                                      | Unmanaged Switch  |
                                +---->|                   |<--+
                                |     +---^------^--------+   |
                                |         |      |            |
                            +---+--+ +----+-+  +-+----+    +--+--------+
                            |PC1   | |PC2   |  |PC3   |    |Printer    |
                            |      | |      |  |      |    |           |
                            |      | |      |  |      |    |           |
                            +------+ +------+  +------+    +-----------+

Answer 2

If you have 12+ users in your small company you should be able to afford to get a networking specialist to have a look at the problem - and that is what you should do.

There are many ways of solving this problem - however you shouldn't need more Internet connections to do it (unless speed is an issue). Indeed, adding more connections just makes the networking more complex.

While I can only speculate based on what you have advised, I suspect the problem is that you are using DHCP to assign each PC an IP address, but have not set aside a large enough range of IP's, so IP's are being reused causing problems for some users. The easiest way to solve this is to simply up the number of IP's.

A secondary problem you may be having - when you try and rejig your network - is that some devices may be behind "double nat", which could cause reachability between devices on your network and is not ideal. (Assuming you do actually need this complex structure - which is unlikely) - a network specialist would be able to come in and renumber and rework the routers such that the devices can all talk to each other without NAT between them (by breaking up your internal network into multiple subnets and ensuring routing between the subnets).

If you do need 2 connections, you probably need special hardware to drive/maintain this, as it means load balancing the connections in some way, and also ensuring that there are no collissions between the IP addresses handed out (one problem might be you have 2 DHCP servers running because you have 2 routers).