[Klug-general] Messing with routers in ignorance

[Michael E. Rentell]

Afternoon all,
I spent the whole of yesterday in an fruitless attempt to get my mate's 
household network to work the way he wants. He is a recent convert to 
Linux (hooray) but looked a bit glum when this didn't work.

The Virgin Media (NTL) broadband cable router is in room A and cannot be 
moved. That is plugged into a Belkin wireless router (wireless not 
wanted). Into that is plugged the network cable to his wife's laptop 
supplied by her employer with all sorts of security on it - Windows of 
course. No further work to be done on that system.

Also plugged into the back of that wireless router is a 30 metre network 
cable which stretches across the stairway into Room B where my mate has 
his setup - two separate desktop PCs, one with WinXP and one with Linux. 
Each PC has just one network cable socket and cannot be equipped with 
any more.

In order to get the two PCs in Room B to talk to each other we thought 
that we could just plug each of them into a second Belkin wireless 
router and put the other end of the 30 metre cable into the 'Internet' 
socket i.e. daisy-chaining the two wireless routers. They both don't 
want to have any truck with wireless - preferring cables.

Didn't work!

How do you daisy-chain routers?  I tried giving the second router a 
different IP address from its default 192.168.2.1 by getting into it 
with Firefox. It seemed to accept a changed IP address 192.168.5.1 
(perhaps that was stupid) but since then it has been totally 
unresponsive. Even putting it all back to WinXP and using the router's 
startup CD won't reinstall the default settings.

Questions:

1. 	Can you daisy-chain wireless routers?

2.	How can I reinstate the default settings on the second (brand new!) 
router to make it useful to someone?

Blind leading the blind again.

Any suggestions (excepting wild guffaws) received with much thanks.

MikeR