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Can I make two wireless routers communicate using the wireless?

I want to make a setup like this:

cable modem <-cable-> wireless router 1 <-wireless-> wireless router 2 in another room <-cables-> PCs in another room

Basically, I want to extend my network access across the house and then have a bunch of network jacks available for my office PCs.

Right now, I have a cable modem going to a wireless router in one room and a PC with a wireless PCI card in it in the office on the other side of the house. I use internet connection sharing with the other PCs in the office. The problem is that ICS is flaky, especially when I switch to VPN on the Windows box to access files at work. I picked up a wireless USB adapter that I thought I could share among the PCs I work on but I'm not very happy with it so I'm going to return it (NDISwrapper support for it is poor).

Is this possible? My wireless experience so far has been pretty straightforward so I have no idea what kind of hardware is available. I've looked at network extenders but those just look like repeaters for signal strength. I want wired network jacks in my office.

Running DNS locally for home network

I have a small home network that just got larger (new roommate, my existing roommate got a laptop (on top of her computer), my friends coming over with laptops, etc.).

I'd like to run a local DNS server for lookups of my local network stuff (fileserver.local, windowsTV.local, machineA.local, machineB.local, appletv.local). I used to have a business line with a static IP, and run bind/named internally. However, now I have a normal account.

My ISP's DNS servers are constantly changing (for whatever reasons my ISP doesn't like to keep the same IP range for long). I need my local DNS to be automatically updated to use my ISP's DNS for external traffic, but be able to maintain an internal DNS server (getting to update the hosts file is being a hassle with every new machine on top of rebuilding existing machines with win7 or Ubuntu 9.04).

Additionally, My ISP's DNS servers often crash or become unresponsive. Are there any open DNS servers that are reliable (I don't want to reconfig every day) that I could use as my primary, then if those fail, then use my ISP's?

UPDATE: Also looking for each workstation to be able to use dhcp to connect, but instead of getting ISP DNS servers, getting my internal one....

What is a subnet mask, and the difference between a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 and 255.0.0.0?

My DSL/WiFi router provided by my ISP has an internal IP address of 10.0.0.138, the addresses provided by DHCP are in the format of 10.0.0.xxx.

Now, I want to start using static IP addresses on my local network, and I don't know what to provide for the subnet mask.

What is a subnet mask?

Should I be using 255.255.255.0 or 255.0.0.0 as my subnet mask? What is the difference?

Why are home networks prefixed with 192.168?

Why are home networks prefixed with 192.168 ?

Why those numbers?

For some historical reasons?

How can I monitor all and any internet traffic from my home PC?

I would like to monitor all and any internet traffic from my home PC to see what programs installed on my home machine are accessing the internet.

I thought I could use Fiddler for this but I noticed Firefox traffic doesn't show up by default, you need to do some setup.

What options do I have to monitor all traffic?

How can I get the same SSID for multiple access points?

I need to upgrade my existing wireless infrastructure and this time I want 2 access points to cover my house, since I get blind spots no matter what with a single AP. I have physical cabling to my central network available for both access points.

I would really like these two to interoperate seamlessly as a single SSID. How do I do this? What are the features that the new access points I'm buying would need to support?

Is there a good DNS server I can install on Windows 7 for a LAN? [closed]

I have a few computers on my LAN, and now I'm getting tired of remembering the IP addresses all the time, so I would like to start using DNS names on my LAN.

I have a heterogeneous network with Windows 7, Ubuntu, Mac OS X and Android.

Is there a free DNS server software that is easy to setup on Windows 7, preferably with a graphical user interface or maybe web-interface?

How to effectively diagnose ISP throttling (or other ISP related issues) and what to do about it?

My question is a bit general but I assume there has to be a good, specific answer to my problem.

I, like many, am beginning to wonder if my ISP is throttling my home internet connection. I'm not so quick to judge because throttling accusations are often unwarranted or unsupported and often seem a bit conspiratorial in nature. I'm not yet ready to make that conclusion.

In my case, my wife and I get our internet through our cable provider, and we have the top-tier, home-based offering for our area. We have found that very consistently, our ability to surf the web between 12:30PM and 2:00PM completely disappears. I understand that this is typically lunch time but, from what I can gather, this isn't considered peak time. Furthermore, we often stream Netflix in the afternoon during what is certainly peak-usage times (8:00PM-10:00PM) and we never have any trouble.

If this is an issue with network load, we should have trouble in the evening, not in the early afternoon.

What could be causing this mid-day bottlenecking? This happens every single day, and it happens on every device (we have over 7 phones, tablets, PCs, etc. and they all have the same problem.) Could this realistically be an issue with ISP throttling? Could it be something else and are there steps that I can take to personally troubleshoot or diagnose the problem?

Regardless, this is extremely annoying and I'd like to do a bit of personal troubleshooting before I call up the ISP and ask them for a bit of customer service. Our ISP's customer service is horrible and they've never been of much help. If I am going to try and confront them on this issue, I would like to know as much as I possibly can about the nature of the problem.

Any tips, strategies or pointers from those who are well informed would be much appreciated.

How much will it cost me to run a Windows Home Server?

Anybody has any measurements of how much electricity does a Windows Home Server (say one of the HP models) use while being on 24/7?

I have an old PC running at home to store files that everyone can access from their laptops, but it is using too much power. I'm wondering if it would be worth to buy a WHS to replace it.

Kwh consumption per day or month is what i'm looking for, as rates vary from place to place.

Edit: Here are my conclusions, feel free to let me know if I'm not right.

Based on Stephen measurements (which validate Joel's estimates), I've come to this conclusions:

An HP WHS with a 2Ghz Celeron (rated for 65W TDP) with only 2 HDD and 1 GB of ram could be well under 2 Kwh a day (The 2.4Ghz Quad Cored max TDP is 105W and was measured at 2.5 kwh per day with 4 HDD and 8GB Ram).

That's a saving of almost 3kwh per day against the old box that averaged 4.6 kwh per day (over 1000 kwh per year). @25 cents/kwh we pay here, that's about $275 a year savings in energy, meaning ROI is less than two years at current (likely to go up) electricity rates.

Now, there is also a new HP WHS with a 1.6 GHz Atom processor. I'll have to check its performance since that would mean even greater savings.

Edit 2: The Atom powered WHS (I researched one from HP and one from Acer) claim that load power usage is 26 watts and that they can go to sleep @ 3W and turn back on upon accessed automatically. @ 26w that means 0.6 kwh per day (meaning even faster at less than 1 year ROI).

Edit 3 (Jul 28): Got my hands on a Fluke meter with data logging capabilities and a clamp and took some samples over time of the power usage of my current PC. The average was 3.45 Kwh per day.

A proper way to create non-interactive accounts?

In order to use password-protected file sharing in a basic home network I want to create a number of non-interactive user accounts on a Windows 8 Pro machine in addition to the existing set of interactive accounts. The users that corresponds to those extra accounts will not use this machine interactively, so I don't want their accounts to be available for logon and I don't want their names to appear on welcome screen.

In older versions of Windows Pro (up to Windows 7) I did this by first creating the accounts as members of "Users" group, and then including them into "Deny logon locally" list in Local Security Policy settings. This always had the desired effect. However, my question is whether this is the right/best way to do it.

The reason I'm asking is that even though this method works in Windows 8 Pro as well, it has one little quirk: interactive users from "User" group are still able to see these extra user names when they go to the Metro screen and hit their own user name in the top-right corner (i.e. open "Sign out/Lock" menu). The command list that drops out contains "Sign out" and "Lock" commands as well as the names of other users (for "switch user" functionality). For some reason that list includes the extra users from "Deny logon locally" list. It is interesting to note that this happens when the current user belongs to "Users" group, but it does not happen when the current user is from "Administrators".

For example, let's say I have three accounts on the machine: "Administrator" (from "Administrators", can logon locally), "A" (from "Users", can logon locally), "B" (from "Users", denied logon locally). When "Administrator" is logged in, he can only see user "A" listed in his Metro "Sign out/Lock" menu, i.e. all works as it should. But when user "A" is logged in, he can see both "Administrator" and user "B" in his "Sign out/Lock" menu.

Expectedly, in the above example trying to switch from user "A" to user "B" by hitting "B" in the menu does not work: Windows jumps to welcome screen that lists only "Administrator" and "A".

Anyway, on the surface this appears to be an interface-level bug in Windows 8. However, I'm wondering if going through "Deny logon locally" setting is the right way to do it in Windows 8. Is there any other way to create a hidden non-interactive user account?

What is the advantage of iSCSI over SMB?

At my house I'm running a Hyper-V server with a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM acting as a file server. Files are shared across my network using SMB. (Also, the machine is using a PERC 6/i RAID card but I don't think that's important)

I'm thinking about setting up a dedicated SAN (iSCSI) machine and then switching my Hyper-V server to ESXi.

What are the advantages of using iSCSI versus SMB?

I think I would still need a file server OS (eg. Win 2k8) sharing files via SMB so I'm not sure the end result would be any different than my current setup...

How will a router with NAT disabled behave?

Just a quick, somewhat newbie question...

I noticed that my home router has the option to disable NAT. How will the router behave with NAT turned off? Will it simply broadcast all incoming traffic to the subnet?

Monitoring Bandwidth Across Multiple Systems in a Home Network

For the past several years, I have been using a simple software bandwidth monitor on my computer to keep track of my monthly bandwidth usage. It has worked fine (more or less; the numbers are slightly off from my ISP’s online tracker).

This works fine for a single computer, but when my mother connects her laptop to my router or if I use second computer, then monitor and managing bandwidth becomes much more difficult.

I considered running a bandwidth monitoring software on each system that is to connected and (somehow) transferring the logs to a central system to (again somehow) be incorporated into a central log file, but not surprisingly, this is a nightmare at best.

I also thought about a router solution (as has been mentioned, but it would need to be easy to use and customize).

Is there an easy way to monitor and log total bandwidth usage (ie from multiple systems)? It should not require all the systems to be monitored to be on at any specific time, nor having all systems connect through another one (i.e., they should be able to connect directly to the Internet connection).

Also, it should be able to differentiate between local and remote traffic so that transferring files between two local systems does not count towards Internet bandwidth usage.

Wrong order in CAT5 cabling -- does it matter?

I've got in-wall CAT5 wiring in my house. The wall sockets were done by an electrician and the requirement was straight-through T-568B, but I think he got it wrong. When I use a cheap cable tester, I see that one end obviously sends this sequence:
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 but the remote unit incorrectly reports with 3&6 swapped:
1-2-6-4-5-3-7-8.

Given that not all wires are used, does this matter? I think it does; my understanding is that wires 1,2,3,6 are used but I'm no networking expert.

Lucky for me, the in-wall cabling ends in a patch panel so perhaps I should just open that up and swap all the 3&6 wires around -- but I don't want to do this unless I'm reasonably sure that'll help.

Also, would this wire problem cause the LAN to work normally at 100Mbit speed but not at gigabit speed, or is that unrelated? (I've asked about that already but just thought it might matter here.)

How do I set up a proxy server for home with bandwidth control, download limit options?

3 room mates share a single 2 Mbps connection. Have a 40GB per month download limit beyond which speed drops to 256Kbps which is annoying.

One of the roommates abuses the connection by downloading beyond his quota limit. I have a Netgear WNR1000v2 Wireless router + ADSL Modem to connect to the internet. We all access internet via Wireless router which connects to ADSL Modem.

I need a free proxy solution which can help me set

1. 40GB / 3 (13 GB) limit for each person (every person has 2 devices - a PC and a phone with Wifi)
2. Uniform Bandwidth control - when 2 people browse the internet they should get 1 Mbps each, and when 3 people access, they should get 2Mbps divided by 3.
3. After each person crosses their monthly download limit, they should be able to access the internet with 256Kbps speed only or lesser.
4. Can I have a custom firmware on my wireless router do this (or) Do I need a proxy server ?

Please point me to any relevant tutorials (for example with Squid).

Update: I am not looking for router only/firmware solutions, I am open to running a proxy server on one of the PCs on the network or any other similar type of solutions.