Dealing with multiple layers of routers

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Wed Jun 7 21:23:01 EDT 2006


On 6/7/06, Bill Freeman <f at ke1g.mv.com> wrote:
> I think that what I need to do is disable NAT and firewall on the Linksys.

  Supposedly, this is possible with some LinkSys routers.  My WRT54G
v2 with LinkSys firmware 4.20.7 has it under Setup -> Advanced Routing
-> Operating Mode.  Setting that to "Router" (instead of "Gateway")
will disable NAT and have it act like an "ordinary" router.
Supposedly -- I've never tried this myself.

> Then would I be able to configure the Netgear's DHCP server to tell the wired
> folks to route to 192.168.1 via the IP that the Linksys has on the 192.168.0
> network?  Or woould it be possible to hide the static route from 192.168.0 to
> 192.168.1 entirely in the Netgear's internal routing rules?

  That would all depend on the Netgear.  It will have to support
manually-defined static routes, and be able to handle forwarding
packets back out the interface they came in on.  The Netgear's IP
stack may generate lots of ICMP redirect messages in this case, too.
It sees packets going out the same way they came in, and properly
tries to sell the sending host there's a better way.

  It would be more efficient, from IP's point of view, to just define
static routes on the clients.  It's a bigger administrative headache,
of course.  You can supposedly hand out static routes via DHCP,
although I've never tried it.

> Or I guess I might be able to connect the routers via downstream ports on
> both, using a cross over cable.  Then I either need to disable DHCP on
> the Linksys (that I'm sure that I can do) ...

  This is what I would usually recommend, instead of the routed
configuration described above.  Just bridge everything together, using
only the WAP parts of the LinkSys, and ignoring the router parts.  Or,
perhaps better still, replace the Netgear router+switch unit with the
all-in-one LinkSys router+WAP+switch unit.

-- Ben



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