Home 2 routers with 2 ssids

We had the Cisco Linksys router at home for quite time, maybe 2,3 years. Since we moved into the current house, the upstairs wireless singal is kind of weak, especaily for Dell/HP laptops. So I decided buy a new router.

After some homework, I bought WestDigital Mynet N750, was thinking about N900 with DLNA support and 7 ports, but the comments on N750 looks better than N900. Anyway, I may check out N900 later some time, so far N750 singal is pretty good.

With 2 routers I have now I decided to setup 2 routers with 2 ssids, one is for N, one is for mixed B/G since I am still using 1st Gen iPod (ancient, isn't it?) and a HP mini laptop (very slow).  Even though my network skill is very rusty, but I thought it should be easy to set up.

Pretty easy to set up and the old iPod is connected to the 2nd router, obtaining right IP address, just could not get into Internet complainting about DNS problem, then set the DNS to the 1st router default gateway. Then it is all working:). This reminds me of old days when I was taking Network Specialist courses.

Some key points I could think of:

Any router had external and internal IP address, internal IP is easy and most time is just DHCP, external IP is what ever the IP talking outside the own network, for 2nd router the external IP is the IP within 1st router range, and for 1st router is the IP with my Internet Service Provider network range.

DNS is just like chain pass from internal to external, from router 2 go to router 1, then router to ISP DNS server to find real route to the web pages you want to see.

And also dont forget the 2 routers are in different subnets (1.1 and 0.1, you can do whatever number you want, just keep 192.168 or if you prefer the other private network start with 10 and 172).

Here is the diagram of my home network of 2 routers with 2 ssids:)

Next I will talk a bit about the hot DLNA topic.