Yes another story about problems with wireless.
Lets recap: during the last episode Tao managed to get the Asus Access Point to work in the utilities cupboard and even managed to squeeze a wireless connection out of his PC. A happy end? Oh no!
It turned out the wireless connection on the PC was so unstable, that it kept dropping out after 30 mins for no apparent reason. After it had done so, it would flat-out refuse to acknowledge that there even was a wireless network active. It would find other networks in the neighbourhood just fine, but not Tao's anymore. The only solution at that stage was a reboot. In several cases a reboot was also needed because the driver had simply frozen all of Windows XP.
On top of this you have to fix up your wireless connection separately FOR EACH USER! In this case that meant starting the ASUS utility too.
This meant Tao's girlfriend couldn't get any internet to work at all.
So off Tao went to get a better WiFi PCI card. Linksys would do the trick, surely. Uuuhh no. Same deal, only without the crashes. This is a good time to remind everyone that the AP and the PC are only 2 or 3 meters away from eachother and that it works fine for PowerBook in the same room (as well as in every other place in the house and garden, but that's besides the point).
So that left only one option: connecting a second AP directly to the computer via ethernet and have the AP do the communication for it.
This of course rested on the assumption that APs are actually able to do this.
To Tao's utter surprise they are! All that was needed was:
- To set AP1 (the original one, connected to ADSL) to be a "hybrid" (i.e. both WDS (Wireless Distribution System) and AP)
- Set AP1 to accept connections from the MAC address of AP2.
- Set AP2 to be WDS-only
- Set AP2 to connect to the MAC address of AP1 (that is same list as you use for bullet 2 btw!)
- Set AP2 to have the same SSID (network ID) and WEP keys as AP1 (This may not be necessary, but it didn't hurt)
- Set AP2 to have an address in the same range as the rest of the network and set the gateway to be the address of my ADSL modem (this too could possibly be optional)
- Set up the PC to have an IP address in the same segment and set its gateway to the ADSL modem.
And you're done. Probably reads like it is harder then it is. Plus, since it's ethernet, you no longer have to fiddle with connections, utilities and WEP keys for each user. Amazing...
It will be interesting to see how long Tao's new found wireless bliss holds up...see it in the next episode of Wireless Woes!
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