Greetings and Newb seeking opinions

[shadco]

Hey there I just joined the forum after lurking for a bit.

I'd like to get opinions on the setup I've cobbled together from refurbed parts.

My goal was to provide solid wireless performance and good support for media sharing to my Home Theater setup.

I choose to run dd-wrt to add capabilities to what seemed to be decent hardware with lousy software, (the linksys draft n routers), the dd-wrt forums were useful in determining which firmware to choose but they don't go much into architectures.

So if you don't mind take a peek at the attached image and let me know if you have any suggestions or opinions.

Thanks in advance.

PS all the wireless devices have Draft N nics

 

[thiggins]

What problems are you experiencing? What sort of "opinions" / advice are you looking for?

 

[shadco]

What problems are you experiencing? What sort of "opinions" / advice are you looking for?

I don't think I'm experiencing any problems per se, It seems to me that the N clients will associate at the max of 130Mbs which I believe is normal based on the airport cards they use.

I'm able to aggregate about 75Mbps across the wireless by doing multiple random file transfers Mac to Mac across the wireless and streaming audio from the Linux box to the DVR. I think this is probably close to the max I would see with this setup.

I'm more or less curious if there was a better way to accomplish the setup or if there are any known problems with this type of design since I came up with it kind of in a vacuum.

 

[thiggins]

Many people would kill to get 75 Mbps streaming performance. So you're doing well there.

If the main AP is set to 20MHz bandwidth mode, then that establishes the maximum 130 Mbps link rate.

Any NAS or streaming source (DVR) should have a wired connection to the main AP if possible. Otherwise effective throughput will be reduced by > 50% when you are streaming to a wireless client (AP has to receive, then retransmit).

But if your setup is working fine for you, then quit while you are ahead.

 

[shadco]

Thanks

All AP's are set at 40Mhz and report rate much higher than 130, When I run Network utility on the Macs they are reporting connection rate at 130.

Wife factor won't allow hardwire to the DVR

 

[thiggins]

All AP's are set at 40Mhz and report rate much higher than 130, When I run Network utility on the Macs they are reporting connection rate at 130.

Ah. Apple has disabled 40 MHz channel width in the 2.4GHz band to prevent interference with legacy 11b/g WLANs.

 

[shadco]

Ah. Apple has disabled 40 MHz channel width in the 2.4GHz band to prevent interference with legacy 11b/g WLANs.

Ah ha Probably not much chance of getting them to rethink that either.

I have a bud who's an Apple enterprise systems engineer, I may ask him about that.

Cheers and thanks