Problems with second router on network

Question

First, here's my house's (mostly wireless) setup.

Downstairs is our main router, connected (wired) to a PC. Various mobile devices connect here wirelessly. Upstairs, via power line adapter, is my router set up with identical SSID and password for Wi-Fi and one computer wired through its LAN.

This setup has been working fine for months until earlier this week. Upstairs was having problems, but downstairs is normal. I reset my (upstairs) router, a D-Link DIR-655 and attempted to reconfigure how it was before we had this problem. Now I am unable to find any settings that work. I follow guides found online: disable DHCP, change the IP of the router, save settings (since other settings to change are on a different page), wait for router to save/reboot, then navigate to other settings, but when I do try to change the other settings, I can no longer view the router's settings in my browser (neither using the new IP address not the default one). So, my only option is then to reset router again and start over.

When I follow all the steps except changing the router's IP (which should be safe, since downstairs router uses 10.0.0.1 instead of 192.168.0.1), I can fix all settings and connect to the router, but can not access the internet.

Any insight or assistance is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

First try to plug in the uplink of your main router to your PC. With this you will be able test the connection between your routers, and probably (if the connection is OK) your will be able to reach and config your uplink router.

I suggest your main router to work only as a bridge. DHCP should come from the uplink router (IMHO), because it makes your system more redundant.

Wireless can come from both router (if they can), if you set them to the same SSID, you will be able even to move between even without affecting your downloading :-) And set them to very different wifi channels (I suggest 2 and 10).

Which seems a little bit tricky, to set up your main router to serve wireless, but don't serve DHCP on it. It can be tricky, maybe your router can't do this.