Question Help me to debug my network

[vkeypoint]

Hi,
In my house I have a netgear modem with wifi (N600) on the second floor. Since I have very poor reception on the first floor I tried to extend my wifi with a second wireless router (tp-link). I set it to use the standard method of extending wifi (same SSID, LAN to LAN connection, DHCP disabled, manual IP). The IP for my netgear router is 192.168.0.1, and the IP for my TP-link router is 192.168.0.100. There is a switch between the two routers.

Sometimes this setup works, but more often than not I can't connect to the internet via the TP-link router. When I ping the IP of the TP-link router from a computer connected to the netgear router I get destination host unreachable, but when I ping the netgear router from a computer connected to the tp-link router the ping gets lost (timeout). I also can't get an IP via the tp-link router (which is understandable since I need the netgear router for DHCP).

Please help to debug what is wrong with this setup. I'm thinking it might be a hardware issue so I replaced my tp-link router with another tp-link router, and the same thing happens. So now i'm thinking it could be the netgear router, or the netgear switch that I have between the 2 routers.

Any ideas? Thanks!

 

[bill001g]

This is so simplistic is has to work. The second router if we ignore the fact it has wifi is basically a switch when you connect via the lan ports. Internal to many routers the lan ports actually connect to the same chip as many 5 port switches. Some of the newest routers have moved the function to the main cpu chip but logically it is still a separate switch just on the same silicon. You could disable the wifi radios in the tplink if you want but it does not really make any difference.

So your connection is going router--switch--switch--pc. The critical thing you have done already and that is to disable the DHCP on the second device. You techncially could have the IP address in the wrong subnet with the wrong subnet mask and it will still function. The ip is only used to manage the second device the traffic does not actually pass through the router logic on the CPU chip.

All I can think of is you have a bad cable.