Connecting two routers at home. Printer not working

[tkhaw]

I want to expand my wireless connectivity at home, so that my upstairs of the house and the living room downstairs have a good connectivity to the internet.
So, my cable modem comes with the wireless N router build in. (Motorola SBG6580)

Lets, call the cablemodem/router as R1, with IP address of 192.168.7.1
My second router which is a cisco/linksysWRT160N as R2 with ip 192.168.2.1


Both are wireless/wired router.


When I connect via R1, I can browse the internet and go out of the world.
When I connect via R2 I can browse the internet and go out of the world.


I have my printer connected to a print server with and IP 192.168.2.160
When I connect to R2, I am able to print to the printer.
When I am connected to R1, I am not able to print to the printer nor ping R2.


Similarly, if I am on R2, I can ping R1 IP address BUT if I am on R1, I CANNOT PING R2 IP address.

If I cannot use the printer for R1, that defeats my purpose of having another router, since it cannot communicate from one router to another router. It looks to me like a one way traffic.

R1 ----XXX ----> R3
R3 --------------> R1 ---------------->R3.

How do I get both router to talk to each other so no matter which router I connect to, I can communicate with each other.

Please help!!!!!!!

 

[Rabbit01]

Try assigning 192.168.2.2 to R2 and 192.168.2.1 to R1.

 

[DelJo63]

Rabit is very close to the solution.

When we connect R#1(lan)---(wan)R#2) we unknowingly create a routing issue for every connected.
If we want to simply extend our lan for more wifi or wired connections,
this will not work as you have discovered.

The solution is to first disable DHCP in the second router.
Then connect thusly R#1(lan)---(lan)R#2 leaving R#2 wan slot empty.

Router #1 will take on DHCP responsibilities for all devices (or WiFi connections) regardless of which router they connect to.

Both routers can have independent WiFi settings or can be coordinated with
same passphrase and SSIDs, but different channels .

 

[DelJo63]

BTW: The network attached printer will need to have a fixed IP address.
This way, regardless of when a system connects or when the printer is powered on,
it has the same IP address and all systems can use Add Printer to create the connection that is reusable.

The existing

my printer connected to a print server with and IP 192.168.2.160

may or may not be sufficient depending on the DHCP range values in Router#1. You can't allow the possibility that 192.168.2.160 could be assigned by DHCP.

In router#1, set the DHCP range to something like 2-25 (that's more than sufficient )

Then you have two solutions to fix the ip 192.168.2.160

• use the printer controls to give it a fixed IP (you'll need to also set the mask and DNS values manually)
• find the MAC address of the printer and use Address Reservation in router#1