My friend has a 4 port router at his house making a home network. I want to get my laptop on that network.
Will this work: bringing over my linksys Wireless router and pluging in, say port 4 on the wired router, into the WAN port on my wireless router? Basically making an output of the wired router the input to the wireless router.
Is this possible?
I’ve chained several routers previously, I think it should work.
yes, it’ll work. But there’s no need to have a second ROUTER, if you don’t feel like buying one. Any hub will work just fine.
Make sure you plug the second router into a normal port on your friend’s router, and hook the incoming cable into the “WAN” port on the second one.
You also need to make sure the two distinct local networks aren’t using the same address space, otherwise the router between them will be unable to properly route packets. If his router is set up to use 192.168.1.x, for example, you should make sure yours isn’t (i.e. manually configure it to use 192.168.2.x).
One issue you’ll run into is that if your router performs NAT, his computer won’t be able to initiate a connection to yours, and you’ll probably have problems doing things like filesharing and game-playing unless you know what you’re doing to configure your router to let this traffic “in” (since in your proposed configuration, his network is “the internet” as far as your router is concerned). If you just want to get on the network and browse the web, check your email, etc, you’ll be fine.
The “correct” way to do this is to put your linksys router in “bridge” mode, which means it connects its wireless network to your friend’s LAN, but ceases to operate as a router. This decreases the difficulty of setup, too, since it removes IP addressing as a variable – you just end up using the addressing scheme that the existing network has.
ntucker is correct about point #a (that network conflicts will be a problem in a non-NAT-ed network), and point #b (that if you do NAT, you won’t be able to see from friend’s network to your new network)… But he’s not including #a AND #b, where you do NAT in your wireless router and therefore don’t need to do any special network addressing to avoid conflicts. Which is what I recommend, unless you need to talk with your friends computers. Also, I haven’t seen any home routers that offer bridging. They are by design very simple routers, and usually don’t offer much flexibility.
The quick answer to the OP is an emphatic yes.
Routers are what connects the internet. Their entire purpose in life is to connect one network to another.
Of course, as others have pointed out, it doesn’t seem that your situation calls for it. It’ll work but be it’d be needlessly complex and doesn’t look to gain you anything.
Yes, but remember, you’ll get twice the sawdust.
Does this set-up require the use of a cross-over cable? Instead of the standard straight-through cat. five jumper…
I always thought when you connect two units like this you need the cross-over cable.
Is there such a thing as a wireless hub? Where does the NAT take place when you use a hub? A 4 port router expects only 4 devices hooked up. Or is can it also work with a hub? I would like eventually to do the same thing, only permanently. My house is permanently wired with three computers, but one is a laptop and I would like to be able to take it outside in the summer or otherwise move it around the house, while retaining connectivity not only with the internet, but also with the other two computers. I think I would like to set this up next summer.
I wonder if the OP is asking for a solutrion that allows him to add wireless capability to his friend’s network, and use his wireless Linksys as an access point to connect to his friend’s router which is without wireless capability?
Precisely, Rick.
Sorry for not stopping back in on my own thread. Thanks for your input, everyone. My friend’s network consists of a 4-port router with all 4 ports in use. I want to do some internet gaming with my friend and the easiest way for me to do this is to bring over my laptop and use the integrated wireless card. However, his router isn’t a wireless router so I would need to bring over my router.
One possibility would be to just put my wireless router in place of his router using all 4 ports and then me on wireless. However, this is a bit of a pain to unplug everything. I was hoping I could just plug my router into his router and jump on that way.
From what everyone is saying, this should work?
Yes. Use bridge mode on your linksys router.