Connecting to a second router kills all connectivity

Question

I am setting up a small network with a network printer. This is on a residential connection.

The router connected to the modem is on IP 10.0.0.1, provided by comcast. I am connecting to this wirelessly using a laptop.

This works until I try step 2. Step 2 is connecting with a cat5 cable to a router. I have disabled wireless on this router for now. This router is on IP 192.168.1.1. Both connect and I see an Internet connection on my wireless one still.

However, when I try to browse a web page, it tells me I am not connected. I am connecting the second router so i can connect other computers to my network printer.

I did a tracert to google.com in both situations. When connected wirelessly only, it pings via 10.0.0.1. When I add the wired, it reports 1 192.168.1.1 reports: Destination net unreachable.

How can I prevent this disconnection from happening?

Answer 1

Another answer by JohnnyVegas has given what I believe to be the best solution in this circumstance, change the routers configuration to get the desired result.

In this answer I've included why you are seeing this networking behavior and how you could fix it inside windows, if you had to.

By default, windows 7 will prioritize a wired connection(normally faster) over a wireless connection(normally slower). This means your browser will be trying the 192.168.1.1 gateway for google.com.

In this circumstance you can easily check to see which connection will be preferred, by using the route print command.

With the wireless and wired connections running, open a powershell window as an administrator. Run the ipconfig command to confirm you have 2 connections, the select-string will filter the output down to what we need to see.

ipconfig | select-string 'ipv4'

Based on your question you should see something similar to this:

IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 10.0.0.2
IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.2

Now we know the IP addresses of your computer we will look for them in the routing table.
In powershell, run the command route print

route print 

In the first few lines of the IPv4 Route Table you will see your IP addresses under the interface column header, to the right of that is the Metric header. Simply put, the interface with the lowest metric gets the traffic. The route /? command will detail how to make changes but I recommend not using this to make networking changes unless it is a last resort.

Microsoft answers forum shows how to easily change the metric value of an interface using the GUI and this 'kb' article explains the Microsoft automatic metric feature in more depth.

Answer 2

Turn off the firewall and DHCP on router 2. Set router 2 IP address manually to 10.0.0.250, subnet 255.255.255.0, Gateway to 10.0.0.1 and DNS to 10.0.0.1

As long as you can do the above on router 2, once you connect that cable again there should be no problems, assuming 10.0.0.250 isn't used by another device. If it is, try using any other address you know is free.