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wireless is driving me nuts...

Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2007 11:47 pm
by Pesto
I just moved into this two story house. The ONLY place the cable modem has a connection is in the front room on the first floor, in one corner of the house if you would. So this leaves me to weak signal upstairs and not able to hook-up my VoIP and other wired devices upstairs (where my office is..)

What i am trying to figure out is how can i configure these two routers so that i have one down stairs thats receiving the internet and providing a wireless signal to the second wireless router upstairs which we can then plug into the built in switch ports on the second router.

I have all of the following hardware at my disposal:
D-Link WBR-2310 Wireless Router
D-Link DI-634M Wireless Router
TwoD-Link Wireless PCI card (One of them only does B, the other does B, G, and N)

Wireless has to come from 1st floor to 2nd floor
Two individual rooms upstairs require signal and one of said rooms requires a few wired devices

so what i figure is if this whole thing isn't going to work (using the second router as an AP and switch) then i can possibly add another NIC to one of the boxes upstairs and bridge the wireless connection to the wired NIC and connect it to a switch for all the required wired stuff. But this also scares me cause all of the wired traffic has to go through that PC to hit the wireless.

Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated.

Re: wireless is driving me nuts...

Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 8:54 am
by kenc51
Depending on the options on the router, you should be able to set the router downstairs to "bridged mode".
The AP (access point) should be able to connect to that. Does the AP have an option to scan and connect to wireless networks?

Another option would be to see if the routers support "WDS" (Wireless distrobution system)
If it does, it's easy to setup, you just need the MAC address of both routers, the SSID (Wireless network name) of the router downstairs and the WPA key.
WDS will allow you to have one bigh wireless network, plus still have the use of all the LAN ports.

The last two options would be to either get a EthernetOverElectricity setup. (DLAN) They are cheap and can connect the two routers easilly.
Or buy a ethernet to wireless bridge for ~$50 and plug that into the WAN port on the AP and set it to connect to the router downstairs.

Re: wireless is driving me nuts...

Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2007 1:19 pm
by lukeqsee
you also can buy an extender

Re: wireless is driving me nuts...

Posted: Thu Nov 22, 2007 1:24 pm
by Pesto
I solved the problem. After looking into what it takes in a router to connect to another router wirelessly i obviously didn't have the right routers to do that. So i took some spare parts in my stash and built a computer that has a wireless card and 2 wired NIC's and then bridged the connections. so now i got it all set!

this works alot better than going spend all the money for an AP...