Some friends that live in an apartment next door and I would like to connect our two LANs together. Both of us have linksys routers (and a cable modem, kinda irrelevent) with about 4 computers on the LAN. My friend's router's ip is set to 192.168.1.1 and mine is set to 192.168.1.2 (both subnets are 255.255.255.0). No computer on my friend's network have 192.168.1.2 as their ip. Both of us have static ip networks. Now here's the problem: when we plug in the two routers together, my friend loses internet connectivity after about 5 minutes. We can ping each others computers when the cable between the LANs is plugged in, but having the side affect of my friend losing connectivity. Any ideas?

Thanks,
CaP

I'm not an expert, but I see a couple of things that could be going on.
It depends on what you have and how the computers are configured.

Are your and your friends computer set to static IP addresses?

What are they?

Also, do you and your friend both have cable modems?

Are the routers 'NAT' routers? (to share an internet connection)

Are there any other computers on either of your nets?

What are their IPs?

If the routers are NAT routers (for internet sharing), are either of your computers set to be in the 'DMZ'? (direct, unfiltered access to the internet)

Let us know....

I said in the description that all of the computers on both LANs have static ips. My friends' computers are 192.168.1.99 *.101 *.102. And the computers on my network are 192.168.1.137 *.138 *.140. Both of us have the exact same ISP and service (through our cable company). I have a Linksys BEFSR11 router that connects to a switch, and my friend has the Linksys BEFSR41 w/ the built in switch. I don't think both of us use NAT, but I'm not familiar with what technology linksys is using in their routers... No computers on either LAN are setup as the DMZ host. Any more questions?

-CaP

how are you connecting the routers together? there should be an ethernet cable going from the wan connection of router a to a lan connection on router b, and then the cable modem into the wan connection of router b, i think, lol, if this doesn't work, you could try grabbing a cheap hub and linking the routers through the hub



Last edited by Sephiroth at Oct 17 2002, 12:13 PM

I suspect that both routers are trying to handle your friends internet access requests. To test this, ask him to disconnect his cable modem from the network and see if he can access the internet and ping you.

If that fixes the problem, check to see if the gateway set on each of the clients.

his gateway is 192.168.1.2
your gateway is 192.168.1.1

Let us know....

Yep, I am thinking that it may be what your default gateways are set to be as well :)

But you would most likely be better served by getting a hub to connect the two nets together, I don't know how many nodes (clients) you have on each of the nets, but if they all go out with the same static ip I would reckon that there is some NAT going on somewhere ;)

Also, I don't know how many ports each of the routers has, but Check out this diagram for what your networks each probably look like on their own, is this correct? (I am thinking that you don't have the hubs and plug directly into the routers themselve, they prob have 4 or so ports in the back of each one; you may just be able to set up a vpn throught the net between each router and network too - check here for more info on that **http://www.homenethelp.com/vpn/ ) :

Hope this helps some :)

/JD

It get it to work well with the two broadband connections, you should hook up one of these...

http://www.nexland.com/turbo.cfm