Re: Wireless networking question
Hi,
I have solved this problem with a little different aproach and much less
money. You don't need a wireless accesspoint.
I have 3(xp, xp, linux-mandrake) desktops and 1(linux-debian) server
at home and a laptop(w2k/RedHat).
Two of the desktops are connected by wire, one is connected with
wireless, laptop can be connected with wire/wireless depending on which
room I am in.
The debian machine has 3 network devices:
eth0 (eepro100) -to dsl line,
eth1 (tulip) -to 8 port 100Mbps switch,
wlan0 (hostap) -USRobotics Wireless card
The hostap driver is capable of performing all the AP related functions
in software. It works with most PRISM 2/2.5 cards, should work with
orinoco.
eth1 & wlan0 are then bound into a bridge:
/etc/network/interfaces
auto br0
iface br0 inet static
address 192.168.11.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.11.0
broadcast 192.168.11.255
bridge_ports eth1 wlan0
I use NAT on br0 to make internet connection available to all my
internal network.
The server also runs:
dhcpd (DHCP server, all the client machines use DHCP to get their
internal IP address)
DNS server
dhcp-dns to update dns entries whenever a new client connects
smtp & imap server for mail.
By creating a bridge, I was able to keep all my client machines on
the same subnet and saved myself from the routing nightmare.
-nak
===================================================================
From DSL +-------+
|eth0 +---+ D1-xp |
+--+--+ +-----+ | +-------+
| +--------+ Hub |-----+
| Srv | eth1 +--+--+ | +-------+
| | | +---+ D2-Mdk|
| +--))) | +-------+
+-----+ wlan0 : ^
: |
+------+-+ +------+
| Laptop | (((--+ D3-xp|
+--------+ +------+
===================================================================
On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 10:05:42PM +0100, Balazs Javor wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thank you all for your suggestions.
> They basically confirm my fears that it isn't going to be
> very simple.
> I must admit I'm not a networking expert, allthough I thought,
> that I have a good understanding of the basics.
> Please let me give you some more details on my (probably typical)
> setup and some of my goals/assumptions. Maybe you could then
> suggest me the best way to proceed:
>
> I have an ADSL router connected to a network switch along with
> 3 PCs connected to the same switch. They all are on the same subnet
> and all have the router as the default gateway. So long so fine.
> They can all talk to each other, share files and access the Internet.
>
> Now comes the notebook. I have configured (for now) the built-in NIC
> the same way as with the other machines, so it works as well.
> Now, I've ordered the Orinoco Gold PCMCIA card along with the RG-1100
> wireless access point. It is my understanding that you can set up the
> access point to act purely as a bridge. Where my assumption was that
> it will basically act as a "wire to radio signal converter" and if it
> were not for the built-in NIC, I could just plug the access point into
> the switch, the PCMCIA card into the notebook and configure the card to
> be on the same subnet as the other machines, and everything would
> work as before.
>
> And if this is the only easy way, then I would simply not use the
> built-in NIC. However, since the built-in NIC is about 10 times
> faster, I was kinda hoping that I could somehow make it possible,
> that whenever I am at my desk or whenever I need to transfer large
> amount of data to the notebook I could just simply "switch" to the
> built-in NIC.
> Now if I need to configure either of the cards to be on a separate
> subnet I would need to route that subnet to the original network
> somehow as both the fileserver and the Internet gateway are on that one.
> So I would need to set up one of the other machines with another NIC
> and set it up to be the router between the two networks. And this I
> think is a bit too complicated for what I wanted to use it for...
>
> However maybe it is possible to have both NICs be configured for the
> same IP address and manually switch between them, so that only
> one of them is up at a given moment?
>
> So what do you think is the best approach?
> Many thanks again for your help!
> regards,
> Balazs
>
>
> --
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