I’ve got my new house wired for networking and am eager to move the cable modem from the den to the basement control center so that I can take advantage of the wiring.
Before laserkitty and I moved in, we had a router at each of our apartments so I now find us with two 4-port switched routers, no (strictly) switches, and 7 lines of CAT-5 throughout the house.
I know the easiest solution would be to just buy a switch and run everything from that, but I just can’t imagine there isn’t a way to stack them and utilize only the switch portion of one of the routers.
Well, unless cash is really tight, I’d recommend against this, as you will have issues down the road, like some things in the house won’t be allowed to see other things, and whatever connectivity issue arises someday (and you know it will), it’ll be doubly tough to debug.
But if you’re still interested, there’s no reason you can’t one router connect to the outside world, and one of it’s spigots act as the internet feed for the second router. Which will get you 3+4=7 feeds. You’ll need to configure the connected interfaces to be on their own LAN; here’s one way:
Cleophus has the right idea. You don’t have to use the router on them – you can just use it as a switch by only using the four LAN ports. You can connect the two and create what is effectively one six-port switch by using a crossover cable to plug a LAN port of one router into a LAN port of the other router. Most computer stores like CompUSA or Best Buy sell crossover cables.
And Cleophus is also right that, you’d better disable DHCP on one of the routers, or you’ll get some conflicts there. Most of them let you do that in the configuration screen (my router/switches have been D-Link, Linksys, or HP, not Netgear, but I’m sure Netgear’s configuration utilities are similar).
This sounds similar tothe advice I’ve recently heard, so let me make sure I understand what y’all are saying:
I plug the first router, the RP614, directly in to the cable modem, and have the four outputs (1A, 2A, 3A, 4A) from that.
One of these outputs, 4A, I use a crossover cable instead of a standard one, and connect that to the the second router, but not to the regular internet input, instead to one of what would normally be one of the four outputs? From there, the other three ports can be connected tot he rest of the house.
This solution isn’t ideal, in that it still leaves me one port short, but it’s better than having to go out and buy new hardware (I have a x-over cable already) so if I’ve understood y’all correctly, I’ll give this a try tonight and see what there is to see.
Thanks… oh, and if I’m misunderstanding, jump on in and point it out, please, I can use the help!