Port forwarding through two routers

Hi,

To get a reasonable connection using WD2Go I’m trying to set up port forwarding, the issue is that the internet is two routers from my MyBook. First there is a device supplied by our cable company (I guess, living in a friend’s house for a couple of months) labelled FritzBox that  supplies phone and internet signal. Then there’s my wireless router that connects my MyBook, laptop and raspberry media centre.

First, I tried to just skip the wireless router, and connect the MyBook and the raspberry to the Fritzbox. Got port forwarding to work there, and got good WD2Go connectivity. Awesome, except that now I could no longer access my MyBook from windows’ network neighborhood, only through WD2Go. This was annoying, because the WD2Go connection dissappeared after a reboot of the laptop. (Maybe this was an error? Windows is acting up a bit.)

So I figured: “if I get port forwarding to work for one device, why not for two devices in a row?” I did not get it to work though. See below for screenshots of both the FriztBox and the router port forwarding settings pages. Is this not possible, or am I missing something? Or is there a way to get WD2Go to remain after a system reboot?

Note: UPnP is enabled on both the wireless router and the FritzBox (note the old IP adress of mybook on the bottom there).

Why are you using the 2nd router as a router?   Don’t connect the WAN port of the 2nd router to your network – connect a LAN port.   Then it will just act as a Wireless Access Point instead of a router, and port forwarding won’t be needed.

Make sure you turn off DHCP on the 2nd router.

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Thanks for your reply! I’ve never messed with any network settings before, so to be honest I have not idea what I am doing. 

I tried to do exactly as you proposed:

1: on the config page of the wireless router disabled DHCP server

2: changed the plug in the back of the wireless router from the one labelled “internet” to the one saying “lan 1”.

This resulted in me not having wi-fi access, and actually made the wireless router unreachable (even after changin the utp plug back again) until a reset to factory defaults. What went wrong?

EDIT: stil don’t know what went wrong, but I tried again by doing this, which is the same thing I thought I did, and now it works. Thanks for the help!

freetambo wrote:

EDIT: stil don’t know what went wrong, but I tried again by doing this, which is the same thing I thought I did, and now it works. Thanks for the help!

My guess is that you needed to give a correct IP address to the 2nd router.   Previously it would have had a default IP address assigned by the manufacturer, but in the “Access Point” mode, you’d need to assign one yourself.  Glad you got it sorted!