Hello comrades,
I moved into an apartment with my wife about 4 months ago and though our internet service is fantastic (gigabit), there are a few problems with it. Our apartment has a networking closet with ethernet connections to outlets in nearly every room, so initial setup was pretty easy. Unfortunately networking is my weakness when it comes to computers so I thought I'd reach out to the community for advice.
Here's what our network looks like right now:
The reason I use the AT&T modem as a switch is twofold:
It has very few wireless network settings and generally is a little glitchy.
It is in the study's closet, inside a wire closet. The reception to the rest of the apartment is not good.
I'd like to be able for the desktops to see the printers, but they can't. I'd also like to connect an external HDD to the ASUS router or a desktop that always stays on to serve as a mini-filesharing device. I'll upgrade to a NAS later for our media.
The problem I think is that I've essentially created two networks: Devices on the AT&T wired network such as the desktop cannot see things like the printer, but devices on the ASUS wireless/wired network can see the printer (it's on the same network). I need to somehow bridge these networks.
I tried to open an AP from the AT&T modem just to connect to in order to print, but the desktops don't have wireless so that really doesn't help anything. The printer is wireless only and the phones can already see and print to it since they're on the same network. The AT&T router is directly connected to the ASUS router, so it should be super easy for me to do this, I just don't know enough about networking.
I've attached the Visio file if that helps.
Thanks in advance for your suggestions and advice.
network diagram.vsdx