2 Routers 1 Home Network | Why Disable DHCP?

i have another video called how to connect two routers on one home network and basically in that video i explain uh this process you take two routers and you connect them both one end on the lan port one on a lan port and one router and then the other end also on a lan port so you have these two routers connected and let's say one of them is connected to the internet it doesn't even have to be the connected internet you connect two routers and one of the steps that i mentioned is you have to log into the second router and disable dhcp now i also want to explain why you have to do that um because there's a lot of people who say well i didn't do that step and it worked for me or like because it because it it makes it real simple if all you do is plug this cable into this plug the cable in on this end and plug it on this end and you don't do any extra configurations it's possible that it might work for you and you might say well why did you say disable dhcp it works fine for me and my response to that is you are right it may not do it may not there may not seem to be any problems at first because what happens is a router all these consumer routers they have dhcp built in and turned on by default so this router has dhcp and this router also has dhcp so what happens is when you connect uh let's say you're connecting to the wi-fi from this router if you connect to the wi-fi from this router it's gonna it's gonna you're connecting everything on the wi-fi from this router and the wired and the wired on this router and the wi-fi on this router it's all on the same network because this cable is plugged in on a lan port on this side and the lan port on this side so all the wi-fi and wired and all the wi-fi and wired are all on the same network on both of these routers so what happens is let's say i connect my phone to the wi-fi of this router it's more than it's what it's going to do is it's going to go out to the network and say hey can i get an ip address and this this router if it has dhcp enabled it's going to be like yeah i'm a dacp server here's an ip address so it's going to give that phone an ip address now you can take a second phone let's say you have another phone and you can connect to the wi-fi on this router and it's going to say hey i need an ip address and this router is going to be like oh yeah sure here's an ip address the problem is the dhcp server on here on the first router and the dhcp server on the second router they work independently of each other they don't care what each other does so this router is going to give a random ip address and say hey this is what's available and gives it and signs it to the phone this router does the same thing to this separate phone over here it's gonna say hey this is what i have available is gonna give you one so this router has no idea which i p addresses that this one has assigned and this router has no idea what i ifp addresses this router has assigned so it's it's entirely possible that this router can assign 192.168.1.10 to this phone and it's entirely possible that this router can assign 192.168.1.11 to this phone it's completely it's random and they're completely independent so in that case as long as they assign a different ip address there's no problems however where the problem occurs is it's also possible for this one to randomly pick 192.168.1.10 and assign it to this phone and then at the same time you can connect another phone to this router and then this router can also randomly decide to assign 192.168.1.10 to that phone so at that point since these are all on the same network now you have an ip address conflict so this one assigned dot 10 to a phone and then it doesn't care what this one does so this one also randomly decided to assign dot 10 to this other phone and now they're all on the same network so now you have an i p address conflict so you can see it's entirely possible that you don't disable dhcp on one of these routers and it might seem to be okay at first because they assign different ip addresses to different devices but the more devices you add the more likely you're going to have ip address conflicts because this router is assigning ip addresses completely independently of this router there seem to be operating together because they're on the same network but the dhcp aspect of these routers don't they don't communicate at all they don't care who the other one is assigning they're completely independent so as you can see you're right you may be able to get away with not disabling dhcp but eventually it's also possible that when it's time to renew your lease on your phone or let's say you go to work and you disconnect from this router and the next day or you come back after work and then you connect back to your router again now it's going to assign you a new ip address so it might give you an ip address if you let's say you have your computer plugged in to a wired port over here and your comp your wired computer might have the same ip address all the time but this router doesn't know so now you come home from work and this router could just randomly assign your phone an ip address that your computer over here already has like like i said they don't they don't know so that's when you would run into problems you'll have ip address conflicts and i also want to point out if you disable dhcp on one of your routers let's say you disable dhcp on your second router over here so you have one dac piece or rover over here anything you connect to this router rather it's wired or wireless it doesn't matter just because it's disabled over here it doesn't mean they can't get an ip address because it's gonna once you connect to your wi-fi or once you connect it anyway to this router your device is going to say hey i need an ip address and then since this is all on the same network your request is going to come over this cable and come to this router and it's going to be like oh yeah i'm a dhcp server i have an ip address for you here it is and it'll send it over here and it'll come out this router and it'll assign it to that phone or that whatever device so all all of these wired devices and all the wireless devices are on the same ip scheme same over here everything's on the same i p address subnet network so disabling dhcp on one device not only is it a good idea because you don't want to have ip address conflicts but also it's just this router it doesn't mean if you connect something to it they can't get an ip address because they're all on the same network and you only need one dhcp server on a network and one though your main router can serve that purpose it's also possible you can disable dacp on your main router and you can run your dhcp server on your secondary router if you want that's entirely possible too the point is you only need one dhcp server if you have more than one then you run the the risk of ip address conflicts and i also have to point out it's also possible to make advanced configurations to your dacp on each one so they cannot assign the same ip address that's also possible but me being me i would rather use the kiss principle which is keep it simple stupid why would i want to make a bunch of advanced configurations on this one and then make configures make configurations on this one when all i have to do is just turn it off on one of them it's just so much easier so i mean if you have some kind of advanced advanced ip scheme that you want to use then you know you can do whatever you want but in the name of keeping things simple i believe in just just disabling it on one of them so just let the other one there's no configurations involved all you have to do is just disable it and that's it's so much easier but anyways i hope that clears up why i say to disable the dhcp server um i hope i didn't make it more confusing i that's the best way i can think of to describe it we'll see what kind of questions i get but if that helped you out please give me a like um and thank you so much for watching see ya

Channel: Home Network Central

Views: 53,232

Keywords: 2 routers on 1 home network, disable dhcp

Id: nOitxBangvk

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020