Specific Advice for Static Route b/w 2 AC66U Routers needed

[PlanetaryEpitaph]

Hi all,

I'm struggling to make my slightly goofy network setup function the way I want. Due to the layout of my house I found I needed 2 WiFi routers to provide enough coverage, and I'm having a hard time making a Plex media server available across both subnets. Here's the basic setup:

Cable modem -> Primary AC66U Router -> Secondary AC66U Router (connected via long Cat6 ethernet) -> Plex Desktop Server (connected via wireless to Secondary router)

What I'm looking for is the specific setting changes I need to make to allow full access to the Desktop from anywhere on the network.

More details:

Primary router has the following settings:
Wan IP: 192.168.1.69
LAN IP: 192.168.2.1, mask 255.255.255.0
DHCP enabled, serving out 192.168.2.x addresses

Secondary router has the following settings:
WAN IP: 192.168.2.224
LAN IP: 192.168.3.1
DHCP enabled also, serving out 192.168.3.x addresses

Plex server ends up at 192.168.3.114

(Side note: I had previously set the secondary router to use the DHCP of the primary router, which removed this subnetting problem, but seemed to cause very frustrating stability issues. As soon as I had the secondary router use its own DHCP instead, the network became stable. Therefore I'd like to keep the separate subnets and DHCP servers for now)

What I've done so far:
Disable the firewall on the secondary router.
Add a static route on the primary router with the following settings:
Network/host ip: 192.168.3.0
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.2.224
Metric: 1
Interface: LAN

At this point, I can access the primary router from the Plex server, by opening a web browser and going to 192.168.2.1.

However, if I'm on the primary router subnet, I can't access anything on the 192.168.3.x subnet.

Any suggestions please? Thanks in advance!

 

[houdinihound69]

May be a bit late in replying, but I have this exact same setup with the same two routers and it all works as expected (including NAS, media servers, etc.)

What I have done is set up router one as the DHCP router and with the second router I set it as an Access Point (AP mode) under Administration. When you change the router to be an Access Point many options are configured automatically for you (and some services stopped) which may be one you're missing with your setup (or causing stability issues/conflicts). The 2nd router has a static address assigned from the same subnet as the first router (but out of the DHCP assignment block to avoid conflicts) and the gateway is set to the IP of the first router. Wireless as well as wired connections on both routers (and another switch in between) all work seamlessly and completely stable and everything communicates with everything else.

Hope that helps.