Wireless Network

When upgrading to the ASA 5505 router, I was left in a situation where there would be two routers on my home office network: the ASA acting as a main wired router, and my old Linksys router acting as a host for wireless clients. The ASA was connected to the cable modem to my provider, and I set the internal network to 192.168.1.0. The wireless router was a host on that internal network with a WAN IP of 192.168.1.5 and a LAN network of 192.168.5.0. This works fine when accessing hosts on the internet, but it was less than ideal when trying to access the wired internal network from a wireless computer. Because of the firewall and NAT happening on the Linksys device, wireless devices were second-class citizens on the LAN.

There was this little radio button the Linksys router that would switch the device from Gateway mode to Router mode. Hmm, that looked promising, so I tried it. This was nice, because NAT was no longer active…a host on the 192.168.1.0 network could talk to a host on the wireless 192.168.5.0 network. The drawback was that I would have to add a separate route from wired hosts to send traffic to the 192.168.5.0 network through 192.168.1.5 instead of the default ASA gateway at 192.168.1.1. With the relatively small size of my network here, that’s not much of a problem, but I still felt there should be a better way.

Since I wanted to stick with one default route of 192.168.1.1, I looked into adding another VLAN to the ASA box, to see if it could route packets to 192.168.5.0 down the port that connects to the wireless router. Unfortunately, my ASA is only licensed for 3 VLANs which are all in use (outside link, inside link, and DMZ). I could spend a few hundred bucks upgrading my ASA license to support more VLANs, but it just didn’t seem worth it.

Another option is to add a managed switch to the internal network and use that to setup VLANs. New hardware is always fun, but again this would cost a couple hundred bucks and there has to be another way…

Finally, the solution became immediately obvious…so obvious that it’s amazing I hadn’t thought of it before. Instead of connecting a wire from an internal port on the ASA to the WAN port on the Linksys, I tried connecting from the same internal port on the ASA to an internal LAN port on the Linksys, leaving the WAN port on the Linksys unused.

This setup works perfectly. I changed the internal network of the Linksys to the same 192.168.1.0 as the ASA internal network, and gave the Linksys an internal IP of 192.168.1.2. The ASA is already running a DHCP server on the 192.168.1.0 network, so I disabled the Linksys DHCP server. Wireless hosts are now first-class citizens on this network…