2 routers in house, internet works but not lan across routers

[tuminator]

i live in a house with 7 people. we have a cable connection and 2 routers (a linksys befsr41 and a netgear mr814). right now i have the setup as cable modem -> netgear router -> linksys router. all computers get internet but only computers hooked up to the netgear modem can see eachother, and only computers hooked to the linksys modem can see eachother. i have disabled DCHP on the linksys router. how can i see all computers in the house?

 

[Squashman]

They all need to be on the same subnet. I would have bought a switch instead of another router to do this job. You can make the other router act like a switch by plugging into one of the switch ports instead of the wan port. And disable DHCP on that router. But now you are down to only plugging in 6 computers on your network. I would buy a cheap 5 or 8 port switch. You can get them for as little at $15 on Newegg.

 

[JohnWill]

Connecting two SOHO broadband routers together.

Configure the IP address of the secondary router to be in the same subnet as the primary router, but out of the range of the DHCP server in the primary router. For instance DHCP server addresses 192.168.0.2 through 192.168.0.100, I'd assign the secondary router 192.168.0.254 as it's IP address.

Disable the DHCP server in the secondary router.

Setup the wireless section just the way you would if it was the primary router.

Connect from the primary router's LAN port to one of the LAN ports on the secondary router. If there is no uplink port and neither of the routers have auto-sensing ports, use a cross-over cable. Leave the WAN port unconnected!

 

[Bob Cerelli]

Since DHCP is disabled on the second router and there is Internet access on all computers, you have a lot going for you already.

You might want to look at what the IP address information you have on all computers. This would be the IP address, subnet mask (which are probably ok), gateway and DNS.

 

[JohnWill]

Until you connect the two routers together on the LAN ports, I doubt they'll get full file sharing working. Internet access isn't a problem if they connect with the WAN port on the second router, since that's the normal connection to the Internet. It's the requests coming the other way...

The bonus of my method is that it works, and has for many people.

 

[Bob Cerelli]

tuminator,

Could you provide more details regarding how the two routers are actually connected.

 

[JohnWill]

If you read the symptoms, it's seems pretty obvious that the secondary router is connected via the WAN port, hence my suggestion.