Can I plug a router plugged into a router plugged into another router?

Can I daisy chain routers? Say I'm a really cheap IT guy for a third-world charitable school. We got one good broadband line and 100 used computers. We also have a whole stack of 4 port routers and ethernet cable lying around. Can I make a 100 port router with 1 starting router? Would I be able to share a network printer with this setup?

 

You would need to make sure that the DHCP server function offered in most router was switched off on all but one of the routers you plan to use. The obvious choice would be to leave DHCP on for the router that connects to the internet. You will not be able to use the ADSL/WAN port on the daisy chained routers, as such they will become 2 port switches not 4 as one port would be required for the network connection from the previous one in the chain and another form the next router in the chain. The other consideration you need to make is the fact that each router will need its own power supply so your going to need 51 socket to use your 51 router 100 port switch. That will be a rather large load on the electricity and may negate the cost of buying a dedicated 100 port switch. You can get 24 port switches cheaply and chain these up instead. Bottom line is, although it can be done it is not recommended to use routers as switches for this size of network.

 

I've never tried this but I think it should work. After all, the internet is built from routers which talk to each other.

For a simple network I would let the first router assign the IP addresses and disable the IP address facility on the others so that they just act as switches. The setup might also work if you let all the routers hand out addresses but I would then make sure that they use different address ranges.

I would give the printer a fixed IP address within the appropriate address range of whatever router it is attached to and make sure the router doesn't give out that address (I use a value such as xxx.xxx.xxx.253 so it is right at the top of the range).

John

 

Yes, you can daisy-chain routers; however, as the second poster pointed out, you'll need to turn of DHCP.

 

Yes you can daisy chain routers. But that many will be a wiring night mare. The main routers should have DHCP, and disable DHCP on all others. Then you loose 1 port because you normally connect LAN to LAN for this to work. You can use DHCP and the WAN ports but all SUB routers must have a different subnet to keep from getting duplicate IP's .

Spend the money for some high port count switches. You will not need any thing high speed since the ISP connections will not be fast. 10BaseT will work just fine. But if sharing and moving files the 100BaseT will be faster.

 

Basically you will want to disable all of the router functions on the other routers (essentially turning them into expensive switches). On linksys routers there is an option in it to set it as "router" instead of a "gateway" when another router exists on the network.

It will work though. However, with 100 computers, i dont think any consumer grade router can hand out 100 ip's. I believe they are limited to 50 addresses.

 

I have had as high as 3 routers chained together with no ill effects on common stuff like internet use, I did not turn off DHCP and it worked fine. However for advanced stuff like playing a game or bittorrent where ports need to be open its a pain.

 

As long as you don't end up with duplicate IP's it will work. Most all of my routes will handle 254 connections. But if you divide 100 connections into a 1.5mbps DSL a dialup would be faster.