Cheap way to route between 2 nets?

IAmATeaf · 31 May 2014 at 12:52

Is there a cheap way and by that I mean some sort of box that I can install that will allow me to route between 2 networks in my house.

I have my own personal internet and also have a company provided ADSL which I've set up of differing subnets. At the mo what I tend to do is just connect to the wireless SSID that need but I'm wondering if I can add a simple box onto the network.

I know that I could get a layer 3 switch with routing to do this but these cost mega bucks.

Caged · 31 May 2014 at 13:46

A router? An Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite should do the trick nicely.

bremen1874 · 31 May 2014 at 15:56

Do you actually need any additional kit?

You could configure the routers so they're using the same subnet and then connect them to the same LAN. Making sure only one of them is acting as a DHCP server.

Connected equipment will use whichever router their gateway address tells them to. You can them use static routes to direct the appropriate traffic to the other connection.

It really depend on what the two connections are used for, and what exactly you're trying to achieve.

IAmATeaf · 31 May 2014 at 20:22

I'd really like to keep the 2 networks separate. I should have added that my home internet is with Virgin and the supplied Superhub2 ain't that super. I tried doing things via DHCP reservations but the SH2 will only allow 16 DHCP reservations which for my home network isn't enough.

From a DHCP point of view I can't configure the router to issue an IP but with a different default gateway as it always seems to default to itself.

I also obviously want to guard against people accidentally connecting to my work provided ADSL, you never know who is watching or monitoring, maybe I'm just being paranoid.

I'll check out the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite.

Zarf · 1 Jun 2014 at 00:04

There are a few ways to do it, I have two ISP's at home, and used the above suggestion of having everything connected with one subnet and one router set with DHCP, for the bulk of my family's devices, and for the others I set Static details to use the other gateway.
Now I've got a PFsense box setup which gives me more flexibility, with gateway groups for fail over. anything in my main DHCP pool prefers one gateway, whilst reserved addresses prefer the other. Setting up openvpn was pretty easy too, you could use this to ensure only authenticated devices go out through the work ISP.
PFsense is free and will run well on an old PC, just throw some extra NICs in there. I run mine as a VM under esxi on a first gen micro server and even that is overkill, it ticks along at under 10% CPU.

bledd · 1 Jun 2014 at 11:45

2x network cards in your PC.

Disable / enable them as you require them. This will 100% keep them separate. Can have a bat file on the Desktop that would switch from one to the other.