Wireless/Wired Router Solutions for 2 Networks?

DaveTheBrave asks: "I'm currently running a home based business on an el cheapo Netgear wireless router off a broadband cable modem connection. I'm looking to upgrade to something better with more flexibility. My in-laws recently sold their home and will be moving into my home temporarily while they are building another. They have a home based business and my mother-in-law is also notorious for attracting viruses, adware and other nasty stuff on her PC (which I have to routinely clean - hence my need for a better network solution). What is the best/easiest solution to segment and keep separate my network from theirs (both wired and wireless) off of one incoming cable modem? I'm looking for something around or less than $500."

Comments

One more router.

[CyberVenom]

You already have a cheapo Netgear router, which I imagine can do NAT. So buy one of the new Netgear Gaming routers that allow you to do bandwidth limiting, and set that up as your primary router, hanging off the modem. Plug your in-laws into this directly. Then take your old cheapo and plug it into the new router and hide all your machined behind it. That gives you access (through 2 layers of NAT) to the net, and protects you from your in-laws' virii, as well as allowing you to gaurentee a reasonable slice of bandwidth from the gaming router to your cheapo router so that even in the case of your in-laws' machines saturating the internet connection with virus traffic, you still have sufficient bandwidth to finish your CounterStrike game before going into the other room and forcing them to unplug from the network while you clean their boxen.

Requisite BSD Touting Suggestion

[nuintari]

What I would do is, get a cheap pentium crap box, stick three nic's in it, and OpenBSD. One nic goes to the cable modem, the other two go to the wireless routers. Just ignore the WAN port, use them as switches that have wireless built in.

Each router(being used as a fancy wireless ready switch, and nothing more), lives on its own subnet, and you can use firewall rules to dictate access rights between the two of them.

This gives you two separate network segents, on different layer 2 broadcast domains, and a strong traffic cop to enforce your rules between them.

Besides, OpenBSD kicks ass.