You know that saying, "so and so has forgotten more than you'll ever know about such and such" That never made sense to me........until maybe now. I used to be a network admin (MCSE in NT 4.0), but I've forgotten so much, and I need a gut check on something. I'm basically a stay at home dad these days other than a small business that doesn't take too much time. My three year old however..........takes up a lot of time, so I'd rather get some advice up front than try to spend a lot of time figuring it out myself. We just moved, and my cable modem/router is on the main floor, and my office and network printer is downstairs in the basement. Bedrooms are upstairs, and we use our laptops/iPads/iPhones all through the house. We have some wireless N clients, the house is a rental, and although newer, there is no ethernet run through the house. Before moving, I bought a dual band Linksys E4200, and I have several old Linksys WRT54G's. The modem/router provided by the cable company also provides wireless, but not wireless N (which i'd like to take advantage of where possible) My plan is this: allow the cable router to continue providing wireless, but not DHCP flash DD-WRT (or something similar) onto one of my old WRT54G's, and turn it into a wireless bridge to connect my downstairs printer to the network (it's only connections are ethernet and parrallel cable). Both the WRT54G and the printer will be assigned static IP's. run an ethernet cable from the cable router to the E4200 and assign it a static IP as well. Allow it to provide wireless and DHCP. All of our other wireless clients will connect to the E4200, and I'll set the DHCP range such that it doesn't hand out any of the statics I assign. it's my understanding that using the WRT54G as a bridge effectively cuts my wireless bandwidth in half, but that won't bother me because it will only be the bandwidth provided by the cable router. The real-world wireless network for my clients will be provided by the E4200, and that bandwidth should remain the same. I know this is probably basic stuff for some of you, but am I missing anything.
The potential gotcha that I see (I just ran into it) is that some routers do not allow themselves to be bridged.
I've checked the model numbers on the WRT54g's (I actually have three of them)........at least two of them should work according to DD-WRT. My confidence levels are pretty low these days (not cut out for such a high level job........major props to stay at home mommies), so thanks for the reinforcement.
