How can I add a wireless router to a wired router?

Question

The Setup:

• wired D-link (EBR-2310) router connected to my cable modem.
• Wireless NetGear N300 (WNR2000v3) router connected to a LAN port on the wired router.

What I'm trying to do:

I'm trying to setup the wireless router to be a separate network, that only accesses the internet through the wired router.

What I've done so far.

I setup the wireless router's WAN port to get an address from ISP (which should be coming from my wired router running DHCP), and the LAN as a subnet (192.168.1). Wired router's LAN is 192.168.0.

The problem:

I'm not able to connect to the internet from the wireless router. At one point my wired router showed that it was handing out an IP to the wireless router, but that is not happening anymore.

The question:

Is what I'm trying to do possible? Am I not thinking about this properly? Do I need to buy a better wired router, with 2 WAN ports? How can I configure these routers to work together?

Answer 1

Although I'm not 100% sure on the options inside each router specifically, on the surface yes, this seems very feasible.

Make sure the WAN port on the 2nd router is connected to the LAN port on the 1st router.

Most routers allow some basic firewall rules to be applied. In the 2nd router simply add a firewall rule to reject all traffic to the subnet on the 1st router... (excluding the ip of the IP of the 1st router itself). Once that's done... you'll be able to connect to the internet but not the private network.

There are much more elegant ways of doing this, but with home-grade equipment and factory-stock firmware... your options are limited.

Answer 2

I setup the wireless router's WAN port to get an address from ISP (which should be coming from my wired router running DHCP), and the LAN as a subnet (192.168.1). Wired router's LAN is 192.168.0.

You do not want to obtain an IP address from the ISP for the wireless router's WAN port, since it is already behind the D-Link router. That WAN port needs to have a local address in the same subnet of 192.168.0 as other local hosts connected to the D-Link.

Check the DHCP server in the D-Link router to determine the range of IP addresses it hands out. Then assign an IP address to the Netgear's WAN port that is either outside this address range or declared "reserved" (on the D-Link for the Netgear router).

Answer 3

Finally got it working.

Physical Connections:

I connected one of the LAN ports on the wired router, to the WAN port of the wireless router.

Configuration

I set up the wireless router to obtain an address from the ISP, so it would be assigned an address from the wired routers address pool. Next I set the wireless routers internal IP address to 192.168.1.1. Next I turned on DHCP on the wireless router, so it would hand out addresses to devices connecting to the 192.168.1.x network. Finally I waited, and waited.

Poor communication is bad for networking

Turns out the problem I was having was that the routers were not sharing information fast enough, and there was no way (that I could find) to force them to speak to each other. The wired router knew where the 192.168.0.x and the external (Internet) networks were, and the wireless router knew where the 192.168.1.x network was. But neither of them wanted to tell the other what they knew. Once they became friends and started talking, the problem resolved itself and everything worked fine.