Travel Technology - Linksys Travel Router Trick,

I discovered this trick by accident, but thought it was passing on. If you carry a router and sometimes want to just use it as an accesspoint (e.g. no NAT, etc.), you don't need to go into the firmware and change any settings, etc. Simply plug your inbound ethernet cable into the "ethernet" jack rather than the "internet" jack.

I discovered this at a recent stay when I was wondering why two notebooks at a hotel both needed to register to connect (internet at this hotel was free, so this was more of a curiosity) and then I looked at the hookup and figured it out my screwup.

Yup...at that point it is just a switch. You have to be careful that it isn't giving out DHCP addresses as that can potentially cause issues (2 DHCP servers on the same segment and potentially differen DHCP ranges with no NAT), but otherwise it works fine. I did something similar for my parents who had an older wireless router and then got a Vonage one. The Vonage one is first in line and then one of the Ethernet ports on it goes in to an Ethernet port on the wireless router. The various other connections around the house all terminate on the wireless as well, though the Vonage router is responsible for DHCP and NAT. The wireless router became a 4-port switch plus WAP. Works great.