Using wireless router as access point
 

I've been struggling with this for a while and need your help.

I have an Origo/Safecom router with a built in ADSL modem, I got a cheap 11g Netgear wireless router so I want to use that as a wireless access point. The ADSL router assigns user IP addresses in the range of 10.0.0.4 to 10.0.0.15 but the Netgear router wants a static 192.168.1.1. I linked the two routers together and disable DHCP in the wireless Netgear and everything seemed to be alright, I coudl surf the internet and ssh to any computer on the LAN. However, I can no longer access the Netgear set-up utility through the browser (pinging 192.168.1.1 doesn't work and I don't know what else the IP address could be), and for some reason gftp (or any ftp software) now hangs when trying to retrieve the list of files. I can ssh and scp with no problems but ftp doesn't want to play.

If I disconnect the Netgear I can ftp with no problems to anything on the LAN through just the ADSL router but there's some issue with going through the Netgear onto something on the ADSL.

I have tried disabling the firewall and Trend security software on the Netgear but still no luck.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks,

Stu

I'm going to guess that by disabling DHCP on the Netgear router, you are letting the Origo handle those chores. If that is the case, then any computer getting an IP address from the wireless side will probably end up with a 10.0.0.x address. So from the LAN side of the Netgear, trying to access a 192.168.1.x address isn't going to be resolved. However, you might be able to access it from the WAN side of the Netgear router. I'm not familiar with Netgear, but a lot of routers have the ability to access their config pages from the Internet. If your router can do this, you could turn it on and try accessing from the WAN side.

What is probably happening is the various ports used by FTP are getting hung up in all the exchanges. Have a read through this to get a better idea of how FTP uses ports and how you might be able to lock them down to a specific range.

You know, it this case you might be better off letting the Netgear router handle the wireless DHCP, and setting it up with a static WAN IP address in the 10.0.0.x range and pointing the gateway at your Origo router.

Hangdog42, thanks for your help. I did try the temote management over the internet but couldn't seem to get it working. Your last comment was exactly right, I did some more playing this morning and set it up as you described assigning a static IP and pointing at the Origo but with the Origo still handling the DHCP.

Now I can access the router set-up pages but FTP is still giving me grief. I'm going to go read that link and see if I can come up with anything. Thanks again.

I hope this link shows a diagram of my set-up, maybe you can see something obvious I've missed ...

http://www.maxtakeoff.com/filehost/home-network.jpg

Assuming that the FTP server is on the Origo and the FTP client is on the netgear, the only thing I can think of is that the Netgear is still trying to do some routing of some sort. Everything is on the same IP subnet, so FTP traffic should go through, but the symptoms you describe sound like a PASV connection that didn't make it. I would hunt through the Netgear's setup pages and try to make it as dumb a device as you can.

Your assumption was correct regarding FTP client and server but I have just found out what was causing the FTP issue. :o the firewall on my test PC (PC1 on the diagram) had the firewall set to trust eth0 but not wlan0, once I set that it works almost flawlessly. I say almost because for some reason when I access the xbox it won't go up a level in the directory structure, I have to keep editing the path.

Everything looks good though, so I appreciate your help, thanks.