Newbie question on Fios and Air Extreme Architecture

[dbaps]

Hi,

Sorry for such a basic question but I'm not a network person. Trying to learn though from all of you.

I have a Fios Actiontec 2.4Ghz Wireless router with a Apple Extreme Gen 4 running 5Ghz physical CAT6 attached and a Netgear unmanaged Gigabit switch behind it in one room also attached with CAT6.

In my other room I have an extended Apple Extreme running 5Ghz for wireless that is bridged. In that second room I also have a cheap Trendnet switch I just bought. If I connect the two Apple Extreme with a Cat-6 cable, the Apple routers go offline and so does the Verizon Actiontec Fios wireless router running 2.4Ghz. If I disconnect the Trendnet switch it works fine. If I connect the Cat-6 cable in the second room to the unmanaged Trendnet switch from the Apple Extreme in the first room it seems fine though I have had one or two drops in 24 hours. DHCP is working fine off of the Actiontec and the Primary Air Extreme with two different ranges of ip addresses.

My question is how I am suppose to do this second room? Did I make a mistake not buying a second Netgear switch? Seems very flaky any way I set it up so I want to know how it should be done? I don't believe Vlan tagging is supported on either type of router. I'm not using the DMZ. Not using Vlan's or Aggregates. Oh, everything is Gigabit except the Actiontec Fios wireless router in the first room and the Apple 1st Gen Extreme in the second room. I set the Apple Extreme's back to factory default and rebuilt everything in case I had something weird. I was running the First Gen Apple Extreme router as primary since it was single band and I could set it at 5Ghz only. However I swapped the two and now the 4th gen Apple Extreme router is primary and the 1st gen is the extended router. You can't turn off the 2.4Ghz band on the 4th Gen Apple Extreme router. Everything is on the same subnet. Everything was rock solid until I attached that Trendnet switch. I even tried swapping the two switches to see if I would get a different result in either room. Both ways acted the same so I don't think the Trendnet switch is bad.

What to do you guys think? What's wrong with this architecture?

Thanks so much...

 

[thiggins]

A diagram would help.

 

[dbaps]

A quick reply

Newbies don't do diagrams but I wil give it a try.

 

[seanmnaes]

Sounds like you caused a loop and the network melted down.

The way I understood your setup is that you have the FIOS router hardwired to "extreme a" and that you had "extreme b" setup as a bridge to either the FIOS or "extreme a." Then you connected "extreme a" to "extreme b" through ethernet. If that is the case then you caused a loop in the network that none of the devices were able to deal with and shut down.

You can hardwire the two together, but you have to remove the wireless bridge before you connect them. Just set it as an AP to extend your network or turn it off.

-Sean