Home network, multiple "routers"

[gobel]

I'm trying to tweak my home network, but something just isn't working properly.

Here's what I'm trying to do:

VPN router connected to ISP modem, and a wireless router connected through VPN router to provide wireless connectivity to various laptops, iPhones, PCs with wireless NICs, etc.

The VPN router is hosting a tunnel to a business network which runs AD and DNS which I need to access from wired and wireless nodes on my network.

Current setup:

Wireless router is connected from a "client" port (e.g. not the "Internet" port") to a "client" port on the VPN. VPN internet port is connected to modem.

DHCP relay is enabled inside the VPN router. Primary DNS in VPN is set to local DNS server, and an opendns box as secondary.

DHCP is enabled inside the wireless router. Same DNS settings are in place in the wireless router as in the VPN router (I believe this could be a key problem, but not sure what it should be set to...).

All wired machines are connected through VPN router, currently with static ip addresses assigned. They seem to be functioning properly for LAN and WAN connections.

Issue(s):

Wireless nodes (set to dhcp) connecting through wireless router seem to have no network access, although I can access both router interfaces through browser.

Pinging google from the wireless router results in 100% loss both by ip and name.



I'm hardly a networking guru, so there could be a glaring error here that I just don't see. I've been trying various configurations and tweaks with suggestions and input from various google searches and the router help pages with no success.

Does anybody have any suggestions or a simple explanation of how this setup should be configured? Perhaps I'm totally gone down the wrong track...

Thank you.

[gobel]

One more note on the prior post:

VPN is set to gateway mode while wireless router is set to router mode.

[wimiadmin]

You're actually pretty close for not being a network guru.

Since the VPN router handles DHCP, you should really have a Wireless Access Point connected to it vs. a wireless router....BUT, I think we can still get it to work.

In the VPN router, I'll just guess that it's LAN IP is 192.168.1.1. On the wireless router, set its WAN IP as 192.168.1.2 and the gateway and DNS both to 192.168.1.1 or whatever IP the VPN router has. On the wireless router, disable DHCP and the devices will "climb" the network ladder until they find a DHCP server which is your VPN router. Now all of your devices should be able to see each other and hit the net.

Let me know if that doesn't work.

[gobel]

Switching DHCP from wireless router to VPN seems to have done the trick. Thanks alot.

Now I'm off to setup network access for virtual machines running in VirtualBox!!

[wimiadmin]

Cool...thanks for letting us know it worked.