Re: Help needed with home network configuration

[Celejar <celejar@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 16 Mar 2018 13:13:30 -0000 (UTC)
Dan Purgert <dan@djph.net> wrote:

> Joe wrote:
> > [...]
> > I'd have thought that hardwired hubs are long gone, that all devices
> > with multiple Ethernet ports are switches and therefore software-based.
> > Indeed, many routers can be configured as VLANs.
> 
> Hubs pretty much are.  Not entirely sure where you're thinking switches
> are "software-based" though. Switching is typically done in ASICs these
> days ... 
> 
> >
> > I had a different problem recently, trying to work out which of a few
> > high-bandwidth 802.11ac routers could be configured in pairs as wireless
> > point-to-point links, which also uses the term 'bridging', and no, they
> > can't all do it. But documentation is usually very poor for the
> > lesser-used functions of most things. 'Bridging' is also used to mean
> > wireless repeating, which is a different thing again.
> 
> Honestly, I'd never trust an "all-in-one" consumer router for that (even
> if it "supports" it on the box). Pair of purpose-built radios (e.g.
> Ubiquiti AirMAX) would probably do best for that situation.

FWIW, I recently followed these directions:

https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/recipes/atheroswds

to use an old Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH to bring network connectivity to a
server in a location without ethernet cabling and lacking wireless
hardware. The Buffalo is configured as a wireless client connecting to
the main switch / router / AP (a TP-Link Archer [A]C2600), and the
Buffalo's wired switch is bridged to the rest of the network. The
TP-Link and Buffalo are both running OpenWRT [LEDE].

I'm not sure if I'm using the terminology correctly, but what this
means in practice is that I have one big network, with all wireless and
wired clients of the main AP [except those on the guest wireless
network, of course], as well as the wired clients of the Buffalo, on
the same network. [I haven't enabled access point functionality on the
Buffalo, since I don't need it.]

Works flawlessly, once I managed to follow the directions correctly ;)
This is the opposite of common multi-ap solutions, that use wired
backhaul and provide wireless connectivity to clients. In my
configuration, I use the 2.4 GHz wireless band for the "backhaul" (my
main wireless clients are using the 5 GHz band), and the server is
wired to the Buffalo.

Celejar