For those of you who know me, you know that when it comes to electronics i usually try and get the biggest and best thing i can get. Which usually translates in to an overpowered machine that in no way i can ever use to its full potential but it is still just cool to have . My network has turned into one of those over powered machines. Let me put it this way, I live in a two bedroom apartment and i have 3 signals running from a gigabit backbone in it. I will admit i do need alot of bandwidth because i stream all of my cable, HDTV, and movies from my media machine to my TV via a linksys dma2100.

So here is how it is setup….

There are a few ways you can run your second router in this setup but i am running it in the current setup to have a hot spot for my friends that visit that doesn’t have my files on it. To set it up as displayed you go to your router setup page and make sure that your wan is set to dhcp and then plug your ethernet cable from your first router or switch in to the wan port on your second router. Make sure before you do this that your primary routers ip address to a different subnet than your primary routers.

Note: make sure if needed you are using cross over cables in their proper places. (although many routers have automatic crossover built in)

To extend you network you can setup your router to basically function like an AP attached to a switch. This will help you get rid of those dead spots you have in the bed room or in the basement. To do this you will need to return to your routers setup page and disable the dhcp server on the router and you will need to disable the NAT setting. You will also need to ensure that your subnet for the secondary router is the same as the primary but that they have different ip addresses. I recommend 192.xxx.xxx.1 and 192.xxx.xxx.2 so that is easily remembered.

Final notes: I would use a gigabit connection whenever possible to make sure you don’t have a huge bottle neck and that your bandwidth hungry items don’t have any issues.