I've recently bought a new house nextdoor to a friend of mine. We both have our own home networks, and our own internet connections and since we're only about 20 feet away from eachother we'd like to set up a wired connection for file sharing.

Network (A) is running a DLink DI-604 (E type) 4 port wired broadband router. On this network is a computer running Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional, and Windows 2000 Professional.

Network (B) is running the same router as Network (A). On this network are two computers, both running Windows XP Professional.

On my first attempt to connect our networks. I changed set the IP address of router (A) to 192.168.1.1 and the subsequent computers connected to it to 192.168.1.100, 101 and 102. On each computer I set the gateway and DNS to 192.168.1.1. I then disabled DHCP. Internet connection stilll worked fine. I repeated these steps on network (B) but used 192.168.0.x throughout the network, I disabled the DHCP, and everything worked fine.

I then connected a straight through cable between an available port on each router. Seperate internet connections remained, but no shares from opposite networks existed. So, we're back to square one again.

Does anyone know if this is possible with our current hardware? We'd like to share files with a wired connection, yet maintain our own separate internet connections.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Grapez

There are a couple of options. First some basics though. Each or your wired internet routers basically has 2 interfaces. 1 interface that connects to your outside connection and the other interface is connected to a 4 port switch that you are connecting your machines to.

A switch cannot route between subnets, and a router can. 192.168.1.0/24 is one subnet and 192.168.0.0/24 is another subnet. (the /24 is another way of writing 255.255.255.0 which is what I assume your subnet mask is set to).

Probably the easiest solution for you without buying new hardware is to place all the machines on the same subnet, but you would still want to use static IP addresses and keep DHCP turned off like you did earlier.
This means keeping all the machines in the 192.168.1.0/24 address space. You can make give router A the ip address 192.168.1.1 and router B the ip address 192.168.1.2. Then assign ip addresses connected to router A 192.168.1.100, 192.168.1.101, 192.168.1.102 and to router B 192.168.1.200, 192.168.1.201.

Also you might want to connect the 2 routers together using a crossover cable instead of a straight cable. The routers may have autosensing, but it is always best to use a crossover when connecting a switch to a switch (which is what you are doing).

Thank you very much for your reply. Now that someone's pointed it out, I can completely understand where I went wrong. I'll give it a try tonight - if the rain ever stops.

Thanks again.