In our office, all machines use IP address 192.168.0.x with subnet mask 255.255.255.0, the network setup is as below:
We only had routerA
before. But since its wireless signal is too weak (much weaker than a typical wireless router), we decided to use the spare routerB
as an access point. My colleague and I agreed that we should turn off the DHCP for the routerB
.
There are two things that we don't agree on:
1) He said we should, to play safe, simply assign routerB
an IP address (e.g. 192.168.1.1) that is outside our network because we are using it as a switch and IP address is irrelevant, while I think it should still has an IP within the 192.168.0.0 network.
2) He said we should not turn off the access point function of routerA
even we now have routerB
as the access point because both routers can share the wireless workload. What I think is that, the access point function of routerA
should be turned off because both routers are just sitting next to each other, and they are just announcing the same SSID. It seems it will do more harm than good because their signals will interfere with each other, which decreases signal strength.
Is there any problem giving the routerB
an IP address outside our network? And should we leave the wireless function of routerA
turned on, or should it be turned off?