cascade routers

[Tarsun2]

setting up 2 routers with a patch cord.
connected to LAN port on both.
disabled DHCP on second router.
router 1 - 192.168.1.1
router 2 - 192.168.1.2
subnet is the same.

question: on the primary router, the second router is connected to a random port (port 4). do i have to configure or assign that port (port 4) in any way on the primary router?

[Seajay]

Edit::: I looked it up, I think you just need to look at your router manual to see which port is used. I've never see that setting before though, I might have to try it out.

[JCC]

What is it exactly your trying to accomplish with the 2 routers? Sounds likes you are just trying to extend your network or add additional wired interfaces? Or are you using them as wireless access points and trying to use the 2nd one as an extension of your wireless to an area that is not covered well? If your just extending wire connection you really just need a dumb switch. $10-20 thing to do the job. If you need wireless from the 2nd router you likely have to plug the LAN port from first router into the WAN port on the 2nd. Those routers are going to translate the IP addresses of their clients to what ever address is on the WAN port when ever they send traffic up stream so the 1st router will see all traffic from the 2nd router and its attached devices as coming from the same IP address, but that should not hurt anything. Do not actually need translation if that is how it is hooked up, but all those devices do it by default as they expect WAN to be hooked up to internet not another device on your internal network.

[Tarsun2]

i have the primary router on the second floor.
in the basement, i added a smart water heater and water softener and would like to use the features but i dont get a wifi signal in the basement. (not strong enough at least).

so, what i was looking to do was simply extend the range of the wifi. but i didnt want to throw a repeater at it.
i want to keep one network as well. so i chose LAN to LAN (rather than LAN to WAN).

i have it working pretty good (the way i thought it'd work) but had a question about one of the tutorials i saw on line.

in the video, they assigned the "connection port" that connects the 2 on the primary router to 2.5ghz and i was wondering why.

[JCC]

I am not familiar with the Cascade routers, but with the exception of the ones made to be multiple wireless access points they often do not support that LAN to LAN extension. Nice that it allows for that. What you will run into is there is no actual centralized control for wireless clients so even if same SSID and password the roaming from one to the other would not be seamless. Not going to be a problem for home use normally, but if you were say using your computer for a work call and roamed between the two may stutter a bit and lose a second of audio or video. This is where those new pricey whole house systems bridge the gap between business solutions and traditional home solutions. Sounds like just extending wireless to you basement not likely to be a problem, but I would recommend turning down the strength of the radio on the basement one so you do not have a strong enough signal bleeding through to the main floor that devices may jump back and forth.
As far as assigning the LAN to LAN wired connection to 2.4ghz (assume you meant 2.4 not 2.5)... That seems odd to me, but I guess maybe it is referring to where 2.4 wireless clients should be put on the wire, but if that is the case would think you would also set it for 5ghz clients.
Really, the 2nd device is only doing layer 2 (switching) and your upstream device is doing L2 and L3 (routing) so I would expect all those forwarding decision being made by the 2nd device to be really simple. The clients will want to go to their L3 gateway as assigned by DHCP (your first router), and that will just be a entry in the MAC/ARP tables of the 2nd device. Clients will say I want to to IP x.x.x.x, router 2 checks its tables, if it does not know sends out a broadcast out to all connections, and when it does know it sends that traffic out that interface. In this case you have one interface not a complicated decision.

[Seajay]

It does sound like what you want is just an additional access point connected by cable, instead of over the air. Having the 2nd router (now that I looked into it) receive the network connection from the first router is fine. It tends to act as a little bit more security as well, but it would be a 2nd network. If the intent is just to connect your smart devices to that network that's pretty common to do, separate the people and device networks.

Alternatively by switching the 2nd router over to access point mode, and then wiring it for network connection should just work as you are expecting, while preserving all the network functionality.

The only caveat to a cascade setup instead of just adding another access point is it might take a little work to expose the smart devices to the Internet for direct remote access, if you want to do that. However if the devices use a cloud service then they should just work fine once they have an internet connection. Your app talks to the cloud service, and not the devices directly, so all the network management is handled for you.

These devices use very little data and are not latency dependent so if you wanted to just hook up a wifi extender it would work fine. I'd suggest creating a device only network if you go this route so your computers and phones don't switch the extender and lose performance. I currently have this setup to get a wifi signal out to my garage... "garage" network. Works just fine for youtube and web browsing.

[JCC]

Sounds like he does have the 2nd router connected as an access point as he is using the LAN port on the 2nd not the WAN. Also, said he disabled the dhcp option on the 2nd so DHCP for the devices connected to the 2nd will be coming from the first. Sounds like he successfully connected the 2nd access point in a way that the clients use the same IP range and none of the NAT or layer 3 features are in play on the 2nd router. So if he needed to allow traffic inbound via port forwarding to the devices on the 2nd router it should work. That being said, you should not be port forwarding traffic to any internal device unless you really know what your doing. Need to restrict the incoming IPs or you will end up with Chinese, Russian, and many other countries poking at that hole non-stop trying to compromise the device to make it part of their ever expanding botnets. Since most internet of things devices do not get security updates on a regular basis it tends to just be a matter of when not if they get compromised if you have access available to the world.

[Tarsun2]

i got lucky on this one as networking is foreign to me and my setup seems to be working.

i thought about leaving both to DHCP and setting the primary to .1 - .100 and the other .101 - .200 (but why?). so i changed it back to primary DHCP and secondary static(?) (DHCP setting off).

i could always make the basement router hidden i suppose. I have my phone connected to both with priority given to the main router and auto connect off for the second router. most other devices dont move around and will just remain on the primary router.

from my understanding a bridge is LAN to WAN and a cascade is LAN to LAN...?

i have 2.5GHz primary / 5GHz primary and 2.5GHz secondary / 5GHz secondary. all 4 have different passwords which might bite me in the butt if the power goes out and everything resets although, i do have a UPS on the modem and routers. Most of the time when the power goes out, the cable is unaffected. with the UPS on the cameras and the network, i still have access over the phone and on line.

Should i lower the signal strength on the second router so most everything just connects to the primary router?

i suppose i could have just purchased an access point and used that instead but i only paid $20 for the new router.

since everything is going through the primary router and no one / nothing is bandwidth heavy, i might just leave it as it is. i gotta go in the back yard and look at the signal strength, the range of the secondary router might be better...

[JCC]

Sounds like your good as is. The term "Bridge" if used accurately is like a switch, but it does not make any forwarding decisions. In other words, if you have a switch with 4 devices plugged into it, after the initial learning of those devices the switch will only send traffic meant for those devices to those devices. A "Bridge" is dumb. It just sends a copy of everything it sees to every device connected to it. Then up to the end device to ignore what it does not care about. A true network "Bridge" has been rare for over a decade. The term has now been adopted to mean a number of things that you just have to read into the context a bit. Common to hear someone say a "wireless bridge", and this has nothing to do with the traditional meaning, and is usually a point to point wireless connection that is "bridging" a gap where a wire could not be ran. Or "bridge" could refer to in this instance how your connecting to devices LAN to LAN that traditionally are not connected in that way so term "bridge" is thrown out for that connection that connects the two. In no way does it meet the definition of a traditional network bridge, but instead is being used because the connection is like a physical bridge connecting two otherwise isolated devices.
If I had these same devices to complete the same thing I may have done it a bit differently. I'm assuming the new water system connects to a cloud deployment, and that you do not have to access it direct on your network. Just have to give it a Internet connection. If that is the case I would of just done the simple LAN of router 1 to WAN of router 2 and set it up like you would if it was the main router. The reason I would do it this way is that water system would now get a DHCP address from router 2, but when leaving router 2 it would get translated to router 2s WAN address (which is a dhcp address received from router 1), and when leaving router 1 for the Internet it would be translated again to your actual public IP. The reason I would do this is devices like refrigerators, washing machines, air fryers, TVs, that are connecting to the Internet now very rarely if ever get security updates. So if by chance your edge router gets compromised and your network is getting poked around a bit having that 2nd device with that 2nd translation helps hide those devices. Would of been a simple setup as would of used it basically as it comes out of the box, and gain a little bit of security. The argument against this is if you actually access those devices directly and not via a cloud service. Or if you were wanting to be able to roam from one wireless access point to the other with little interruption as possible, but since you did not even use same WLAN and key that is not the case anyway as would be a full disconnect/reconnect.

[Tarsun2]

would i notice any difference if i were to go LAN-WAN rather than LAN-LAN? this sounds like a simple revision, would i simply go R1 LAN to R2 WAN and enable DHCP on R2?

and is there a way to have one SSID for 2.5GHz and one for 5GHz rather than 4 different SSID's on 2 different routers?

[JCC]

You would not notice a difference for your use case. The 4 different SSIDs is because the particular routers you have separate the 2 different bands into separate SSIDs. So 2 per router and 4 total. If you configured the SSIDs with exact same name and password your devices would only see 2. This is not an uncommon way of SSIDs being divided, but other devices do one SSID for both radio bands so you would only have the one for both 2.5/5. Back to having same SSID and keys on both routers clients would attempt to roam between the two if moving around and signal strength dictated the need to make a change. Again, not actually a bad thing for devices to grab the strongest signal. You would have a slight blip each time you roamed as there is not a shared “brain” between the access points so they would not handle the disassociation with one and association with the other seamlessly, but it would still be good as the “client” would negotiate its new connection before dropping its old. Most cases the loss is so small it would go unnoticed. Things like voice and streaming video are only things that you may have that slight blip.

[Seajay]

would i notice any difference if i were to go LAN-WAN rather than LAN-LAN? this sounds like a simple revision, would i simply go R1 LAN to R2 WAN and enable DHCP on R2?

and is there a way to have one SSID for 2.5GHz and one for 5GHz rather than 4 different SSID's on 2 different routers?

No and yes. For smart devices as these are not latency dependent and are very low data use they should not see any performance hit from bridging over the air instead of with a cable. The issue with extending a network with the wifi signal is the switching only goes 1 way when the devices are talking, so they have to wait to talk and listen. On the Lan to Lan setup the devices can talk and listen at the same time.

You can use say the 5Ghz radio to act as the "backbone" signal between routers and use the 2.4 signal for wifi devices. This is better, but still not as good as cable.

If you use the same SSID it should work fine. Some routers handle device management better than others, so devices are not switching back and forth between hardware, but if only 1 router is assigning IP's then it work fine. Worst case is you see signal drops when moving as the devices switch between routers.

[JCC]

He is saying WAN port as in the Wide Area Network or the Internet port. Not a wireless connection. Right now his second router is connect from its LAN port to a LAN port on the first. It is basically connected as a switch, but a switch that also serves wireless clients. No dhcp, routing, or anything else happening. Just a layer 2 connection back to the first router that provides dhcp, the L3 gateway, and NAT out to the internet. If he switched to using the WAN (internet) interface on router 2 it would use a unique subnet for its clients, provide dhcp, be the L3 gateway for those clients, and NAT the traffic outbound from R2.

[Seajay]

Oh right. Ya if you want to enable the 2nd router as a "router" you'd need to use the WAN port. Although some fancier models let you configure one of the LAN ports too.

[Tarsun2]

JCC, thats it in a nutshell.

my needs are very "basic". no redundancy, no streaming, video sharing, or any high level needs.

one thing i did not change was the subnet mask. do i need to change the subnet mask on R2?

[JCC]

If sticking with the LAN to LAN setup the subnet mask will be the same. I think you mentioned they were 192.168.1.1/24 and 192.168.1.2/24. The /24 is the mask and is also represented by 255.255.255.0. This defines the size of the 192.168.1.0 network. In this case it would be 192.168.1.0-192.168.1.255 with the address ending in .0 being the network address and the one ending in .255 being broadcast and the other 254 being useable for devices. You have one is called a flat network. Meaning you have one subnet that makes up everything. If you went LAN to WAN the 2nd router would need to use a different network for its clients. It would still be part of the 192.168.1.0/24 network on its WAN interface, but would need to hand out a different range to its clients. The next available network would be 192.168.2.0 and then the subnet mask would set the size. /24 being the most common used. Though you could go smaller to a /25 and subnets for by powers of 2 so that would cut the size in half from 256 to 128. The range would then be 192.168.2.0-192.168.2.127. You can keep reducing the size down to a /32 which just refers to a single address and is not actually usable for anything you would want to be doing. A /24 is best solution for home users. Now by default these home devices will NAT (Network address translation) traffic as in devices on the LAN side will use the WAN address when talking out to the internet. This is done because your 192.168.1.0/24 can not exist on the public internet as it’s the same addresses being used by everyone else so would be like every home in the world have 123 Main Street as an address and expecting them all to get the right mail. Instead all the devices on your home network get translated to one public IP that is unique to your network. I say all that to say this. You do not actually need NAT if not going out to public internet so your 2nd router would not need to NAT. However, if you do not NAT traffic leaving the 2nd router to an address is router 1s network (192.168.1.0-255) then router 1 will have to be told how to get back to that network. As by default router 1 is going to think everything it does not know as directly connected is out the WAN. So you would have to create a route on R1 that says the 192.168.2.0/24 next hop is R2 at 192.168.1.2. Then it will send all 192.168.2.0/24 traffic to R2, 192.168.1.0/24 to directly connected devices, and everything else out the WAN. Easy to just have R2 NAT everything leaving it to a 192.168.1.0/24 address since that is default behavior of the WAN interface, and then R1 knows where to send return traffic without creating a route as it will see it as having come from a directly connected address in the 192.168.1.0/24 network.
Hopefully, this is a good learning experience for you, but I think your good leaving everything as is with the exception of maybe setting all your wireless networks the same to get down to just 2 networks instead of 4. If you do this remember to turn down radio strength of basement so you do not roam from one to other often. And as fyi the 2.4 band provides longer range and the 5 provides fast speeds. The speeds