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So I have one router downstairs which provides the internet. I have set the DHCP server range to start from 3 and this router has .1 itself. The second router connected to the first router through an ethernet cable has .2 as IP address.

In order to make this bridging happen and let both act as 1 network but with better coverage I read that I need to turn off DHCP on the second router and duplicate all of the SSID and security settings of the first router. Of course I also need to make sure the 2 routers are far away with their channels.

The problem is that after assigning the IP addres .2 to the second router I turn off DHCP (SSID and security settings are still different between routers). I can't access the second router anymore and it doesn't seem to work.

What am I doing wrong?

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  • I guess you want to use the second router as a switch. One part of this solution is connecting two routers with their "LAN" ports. A home router has (at least) two IPs: for WAN interface and for LAN interface. It's not clear which one you mean when you "assign the IP address .2 to the second router".
    – Kamil Maciorowski
    Commented Dec 29, 2017 at 12:01

1 Answer 1

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Routers usually run some kind of embedded Linux. In both routers, you should have a bridge (say, br0) which contains both the wireless access point (say, wlan0) and the LAN interface to the four switch ports (say, eth0). You can then assign a static IP to br0 in both routers (say, 192.168.0.1 in the first router, and 192.168.0.2 in the second router), and run DHCP with some range of dynamic IPs (say, 192.168.0.100 to 192.168.0.200) that doesn't overlap with the static IPs. This will make both WLAN APs behave like a single LAN segment, so exactly what you want.

The next question is how to configure that on the router web GUI. It's not always clear what the GUI actions do internally (so "assigning the IP address .2 to the second router" may have done something else than you think it does), and it may or may not be possible to configure the second router in this way using the GUI alone. If it's not possible with the GUI, you'll need root access to the router, possibly by re-flashing the router with an open firmware (e.g. OpenWRT).

In any case, as you didn't say what brand and model the second router is, it's difficult to say what you exactly need to do (if one can derive that information from a googled manual at all).

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