wireless bridging.

[d3ano]

i am trying to set this up at a friends house, but its not working for me.

There is a Belkin ADSL modem down stairs connected to this via cat5 is a belkin 7130 wireless acesses point. Upstairs is another Wireless access point.
At present the two are working, but i have to keep switching between the two when i move around the house with the laptop.
Is there a way to setup the wireless acess point so they work together as one, so i don't have to keep switching the signal as i move around the house?

Thanks

D3

[LongQ]

d3ano said:

i am trying to set this up at a friends house, but its not working for me. There is a Belkin ADSL modem down stairs connected to this via cat5 is a belkin 7130 wireless acesses point. Upstairs is another Wireless access point. At present the two are working, but i have to keep switching between the two when i move around the house with the laptop. Is there a way to setup the wireless acess point so they work together as one, so i don't have to keep switching the signal as i move around the house? Thanks D3

I would have thought it should be unneccessary to have 2 WAP's in the house - unless it is a very large house or the structure is not signal friendly. I have a peer to peer ad-hoc wireless set up which seems to work fine from most locations in the house. WAP's should have a much greater range.

Beyond that, not having played with WAP's yet, but my understanding is that is should be possible to enable the mobile units to 'roam' though I cannot be sure that all implementations on the portable will allow this.

[d3ano]

Mate lives in a 6 bedroom house in Wimbledon. 3 floors and thick walls. Not signal friendly at all.
Just want to set it up so that he doesn't have to keep switch between the different Wireless Acess Points, whilst in the house.

[Zod]

With XP SP2, if they are both preferred networks, it should switch when the signal becomes too weak on the WAP to which the laptop was connected.

[d3ano]

should the name of each wireless access point be the same as the wireless router?

[malman]

You have both access point (upstairs and downstair) connected to the adsl modem via cable - right?

(only done this once for a test so this is from memory)
Set the SSID for both access points to be the same. Access point name can be different and should be I think.
Set the channels so they don't interfere.
You can set different wep settings (I think)

Setup the two network connections in XP (test them) and set them to automatically connect and you should be able to roam with XP switching to the strongest siganl.


(never tried this yet)
If the two access points are not wired to the DSL you can use repeater mode (WDS) if your access points support it. With this mode you set the SSID and chanels on the access point to be the same (i think) and you enter the MAC address of the downstairs access point on the upstair point. This needs both access point to be in wireless range of each other obviously.

edit to add in repeater mode any wep settings must be the same across both access points


>> Edited by malman on Tuesday 15th February 13:50

[d3ano]

cool, thanks for the help guys. i will give it a go tonight.