WHERE I AM AND HOW I GOT HERE:
I am a teacher. Covid has totally changed this profession. A few weeks back, we went into total lockdown and all teaching is now on-line only using TEAMS. We now have 3 choices … We can …
1/ Quit (some have done this)
2/ Go into the board office (with about 15 – 20 other teachers) be given a cubicle with a computer and proceed and try to get on with the job of course being masked the entire time. Needless to say, it’s an anxiety filled environment with everyone trying to get up to speed on this entirely new way of doing things. There are a couple of I.T. support people but … they’re just constantly swamped troubleshooting everyone’s problems. Bottom line … not a place you want be.
3/ Work from Home. By far the best option but you need the hardware, infrastructure to pull it off. I tried this using wifi and just couldn’t manage it so back to the board office for me.
One of the different things about on-line teaching is that the parents are often in the background hovering about. One in particular, noticed my disconnection and stuttering issues and jumped in. His company has the contract for ethernet wiring at the university. They’ve recently changed specs so that he’s no longer allowed to use CAT 5e wiring. He offered to give me a bunch of stuff from his mini-warehouse storage place. I accepted and he loaded me up with a huge spool of CAT 5e wire … a bunch of connectors … crimpers and 4 or 5 modems. Knowing nothing about networks etc. I did things in the wrong order; crimped up some cables (this turns out to be a bit tricky but manageable) and set up a secondary router (I picked the prettiest looking one). Turns out of course, it wasn’t the best choice. Anyways … As soon as I switched to wired LAN … bingo … I can now work at home! … no disconnection or stuttering whatsoever … been doing this for about a week so … very happy about this … mission accomplished in as far as the oh so important task of making a living is concerned. All is good in this regard.
I’m pretty sure that as far as WAN is concerned … my infrastructure can exceed the speed of the incoming signal from the ISP … I’m in the country … there’s only one ISP out here and I’ve got the top package they offer. I’m at the very end of a dead-end road and service is unlikely to improve anytime soon. BUT … just because I have lousy WAN … doesn’t mean I can’t have pretty decent wired LAN … right? OK … so I started a thread about that … got tons of help … we managed to find and eliminate a bunch of 100 Mbps bottlenecks. Very happy to say that I can now copy files from one computer to another at roughly 635 Mbps (a ways off of the ideal 1000 Mbps but not too shabby … right?). That’s only provided that both laptops are wire connected to my primary router. It has 10/100/1000 ports. I’m thinking the next step forward for me is to improve the secondary router. Turns out, the one I picked (a dlink) has only 10/100 LAN ports so … it’s another bottleneck for my wired LAN system … right? Looking at the routers, there is one (a Linksys) with 4 10/100/1000 LAN ports, removable antennae (which may be very useful later when it gets put where I think it’s going to go … more on that later) and a usb 3.0 port. I’m thinking this would be a much better choice for a secondary … am I right about this? My goal here, of course, is to be able to copy files from one laptop (wire connected to the secondary router) to another laptop (wired to the primary router) at 635 Mbps or at least close to that speed.
Ok my previous help searches were hampered by not understanding that LAN could mean wifi as well as wired connections. Without specifying wired in the search I got endless information about secondary routers connecting to primaries by wireless … wifi signals bouncing back and forth between the routers. This had me concerned, since I’m trying to get the speeds I want … I don’t want wifi involved at all. Late last night (after all the help I received from the naive questions thread) I regoogled using the ‘wired connected secondary routers’ and got pointed to much better information. I think I see now how to take wifi out of the router to router connection.
I think this from the Linksys website will be my bible to configuring the new router:
https://www.linksys.com/gb/support-article/?articleNum=132275
Previous to last night, I thought I wanted to set it up as ‘a bridge’. Turns out … ‘bridge’ means wifi router to router so … it seems what I really want is ‘cascade’. It seems there are 2 ways to ‘cascade’ … if I go primary router LAN to LAN port of secondary … both routers end up on the same network (this is what I want … right?). If I connect it primary LAN to WAN of secondary … I’d end up with entirely separate network … is that right? Kinda cool but not what I want … right?
Anyway … enough for one post. Sorry if I’ve rambled on but I’m trying to ‘get my head around’ all this stuff. Am I correct in my thinking so far … that I want to set this secondary router as a ‘Cascade’ LAN to LAN connection?