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Cascading 2 routers. Do I change anything?

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spartan77777

Occasional Visitor
I had an unmodified NetGear 3700 for a while and functions without problems although I hate the inteface with a passion. I was using HMA on the PC as I needed and it was always a bit of a headache to remember to enable. Decided to go with a VPN on the router approach and got myself a RT-N66U and flashed it with merlin. Managed to get OpenVPN functioning after some effort. The way it is configured at the moment is:
Modem <--> RT-N66U router <---> NetGear 3700 router <--> switch<--> PC(s)
I am running RT-N66U with 192.168.1.x and NetGear with 192.168.0.x.
I have wireless and DHCM enabled on both routers. I have not modified a single thing on existing NetGear 3700 and basically just added RT-N66U ahead of it. So, my model feeds into WAN port of RT-N66U and NEtGear 3700 WAN port is wired to the LAN port of RT-N66U. I am getting the following results:
- If I use the wireless connection offered by RT-N66U I have normal internet access but can't see my NAS, other PCs and printers on my existing network (as expected) due to their presence on a different subnet. My OpenVPN is full time engaged without problems.
- If I use the wireless or wired connection offfered by NetGear 3700 I have my odl existing completely functionality with access to everything and all my connections are going over OpenVPN of RT-N66U maintaining OpenVPN use. No issues what so ever.

What is also a bit odd to me, I can get to either router web gui without problems although they are on different subnets. I have kept my subnet mask on both routers same as before 255.255.255.0 and clients are all set to get all from router.

So, finally my question, is this normal. I am not planning to stay in this setup long term and slowly migrate things from NEtGear onto RT-N66U. So, this was purely experimental but I am very surprised how everything worked without a hickup. I don't quite get how I can access both subnets through the old router's connection. Thanks.

Is there something wrong with this picture. :confused:
 
It actually makes perfect sense that it works.

Your routers were most likely set up as DHCP on the WAN interface. So long as the internal networks aren't the same IP networks (say one router is 192.168.1.1 and one is 192.168.0.1), then devices plugged into the 3700 will route to their default gateway (the 3700) and that device see's the other network as directly connected, so it will route to it without issue. It will NAT your IP behind it's WAN IP though, which may or may not cause an issue for you.

It all makes perfect sense as to why it's working. The only thing that doesn't make sense to me is why you would have two routers plugged in back to back. If you change the new router's internal IP to match that of the old routers, you should be able to just one for one swap them.
 

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