This works for networks that are actually accessible inside your own network.
I suppose with the two VPNs, the two subnets aren’t actually transparent / visible from one to the other. Not familiar with those two and if you can configure them to recognize other local networks outside their own scope?!
Can your two networks actually talk to eachother? If their range is close, but you don’t set up routing in the routers themselves to be able to find eachother, then maybe that is triggering a “remote” connection between devices in different subnets.
The way I have it set up is the router from the cable company goes into a Switch, then 1 port from the switch goes to router a and 1 port goes to router b.
Router 1 is on 192.168.1.1
Router 2 is on 192.168.2.1
This allows them to run independently of each other and not interfere with channels.
I thought that they would then be subsets of each other on same network.
No idea how running VPNs on the routers will affect things. Suggest you leave the VPNs disabled until you get Plex working as desired. Note that in general, Plex and VPNs do not play nice with each other. Plex uses port forwarding for remote access, and a VPN, depending on how it is configured, can block access to the port forward.
Is the cable company device acting as a router or as a modem?
If a router, what IP address range is assigned?
If it is 192.168.1.x/24, then it is in conflict with your settings on Router 1. You’ll need to change the subnet used by either cable router or router 1.
You’ll also need to put routing statements in Router 1 and Router 2 so they know about each other:
tell router 1 to send all packets for 192.168.2.x directly to router 2, not to the cable router
visa-versa for router 2
That will keep all your traffic local, instead of going through the cable company router.
That’d only work if one of the two standalone routers is subservient to the other. You can’t have both be parallel to each other but connected. Either one is the gateway for the other, or both use the cable modem as their gateway.
By default, any traffic request a router doesn’t know how to handle is sent to its own gateway, which in this case sounds like it is the cable router/modem. So THAT router is where you would want to put in routes labeling which cable connected to the cable router/modem is for the 192.168.1.x network, and which one is the 192.168.2.x network.
