Networking 2 routers

[Masta K]

Hi,

I'm looking to get a static IP from my ISP so I'm getting a router that's able to establish the required VPN connection. However, I have an Asus AC-66U router (which, to the best of my knowledge, cannot establish a VPN connection) which I still want to do all my routing and networking with.

At the moment I just have my current modem in bridge mode with the router dialling the connection. In my new setup the modem will have to establish the connection so that I can get the static IP but I'll then have double NAT issues when trying to access my network remotely which really defeats the purpose of a static IP.

Is there any way to have the modem dial the connection and then offload all networking and routing etc to my Asus router?

 

[RoganDawes]

Care to detail what sort of VPN you need in order to connect to your ISP?

Based on http://event.asus.com/2012/nw/dummy_ui/en/Advanced_WAN_Content.html, it seems that the router can establish a PPtP or L2TP tunnel over an existing ADSL connection. If that matches up with what your ISP requires, I'd get a cheap ADSL modem to manage the ADSL connection and basic PPPoE connection (i.e. get a random assigned IP address from your ADSL provider), then let the ASUS handle connecting to your Fixed IP ISP.

That VPN then becomes your default route from the ASUS, and the fixed IP address will be the main entry point into your internal network. Anyone trying to monitor traffic coming from your ADSL modem would just see the VPN setup and subsequent tunnelled traffic (most likely opaque due to encryption). Any connection attempts to the randomly assigned IP address managed by the ADSL modem would be rejected (hopefully), since it is not (should not be) configured to forward any traffic to the ASUS behind it.

Any connection attempts to the fixed IP would be handled by the ASUS, and any forwarding rules that you have configured would be followed. No requirement to deal with NAT at all, really.

 

[ponder]

That asus router will also do custom firmware (dd-wrt, tomato & asuswrt-merlin) if I'm not mistaken so I suspect you will be good to go.

 

[Masta K]

Care to detail what sort of VPN you need in order to connect to your ISP?

Based on http://event.asus.com/2012/nw/dummy_ui/en/Advanced_WAN_Content.html, it seems that the router can establish a PPtP or L2TP tunnel over an existing ADSL connection. If that matches up with what your ISP requires, I'd get a cheap ADSL modem to manage the ADSL connection and basic PPPoE connection (i.e. get a random assigned IP address from your ADSL provider), then let the ASUS handle connecting to your Fixed IP ISP..

The router can establish a PPTP connection however it doesn't give the option of entering a "Shared Secret" as is required by Axxess to use a static IP. I asked Asus customer support and all they told me was that the standard asuswtr doesn't currently support it and there aren't currently plans for it to be supported.

On the case of ddwrt i'm not confident enough to flash my router because I wouldn't know what to do if something broke so I'd rather stick with the original. Also, the built in features such as asus AI Cloud, etc would disappear and I'm using them quite frequently.

I saw somewhere that I can just put the router in the modem's dmz and the router will then handle all incoming requests etc. I'll try research a little more on this option for bypassing the modem's routing.