Sharing printer over 2 routers?

[d4mo]

Is it possible to share a printer over 2 routers daisy chained together?

The deal is I have a printer connected to a vista computer that is connected to router/switch 1. Router 1 is connected to the net. router 2's WAN port is connected to a switch port on router 1. The computer that I want to connect to the printer is an XP machine on router 2.

Any way to get this to work?

 

[MrChad]

Do you have DHCP disabled on router 2? That way it will act as a switch, router 1 will assign all IPs and you'll have everything on the same subnet.

 

[jtvang125]

Yes it will work under these 2 conditions.

1. DHCP is turned off on router 2
2. Printer is shared on the Vista box and it has to be on whenever you need to print to it from any other machine on the network.

 

[d4mo]

Sounds great. Never even thought of turning DHCP off.

Thanks

 

[Crusty]

It still won't work unless your main router has a route to the subnet behind the second router and assuming your second router will know how to handle the traffic.

Why do you have two routers daisy chained together? Unless you are doing to segregate the networks for security it's better to just hook the two routers up with a cable between two switch ports, turn off DHCP on the second router and disable the WAN port on the second router.

The act of disabling DHCP will NOT force your router to run as a switch. Your router already is a switch, with an additional port(WAN port). So to use only the switch portion, you need to disconnect the WAN port and plug that cable into one of the LAN jacks. The other option is to just get a real switch to use.