D-link Wireless Router Setup

This took far too long! In a nutshell, I was trying to add the router to my existing network, which didn't work. As initially configured, the router is setup to lie between your modem and your PC, and serve as the gateway to your home network. Since my Debian machine already performs that function, I needed to disable the routing features of the D-link router.

First I had to disable my network because the router's default IP address is 192.168.0.1. So I had to edit /etc/network/interfaces to allow a connection between the Debian machine and the router. This gave me access to the router's web configuration by entering 192.168.0.1 in my browser. Once that was accomplished, the web interface allows you to change the IP address to match an available IP address on the original network and disable the router's dhcp server.

Making those changes to the router and copying my original /etc/network/interfaces back into place did the trick. Now the D-link wireless "router" really acts as a network switch with 3 available ethernet ports and who-knows-how-many wireless "ports".

Of course, it should be cheaper/simpler to buy a wireless/ethernet switch with no routing capability. Does such a device exist? Maybe the major expense is associated with the wireless portion, so the routing functionality just ends up getting thrown in.