Question regarding home network

[adeptms]

Hi guys,

I know very little about networking and hope you can help me to find best solution...

I have office room that has cable modem & wifi router (linksys g).

Is there wireless device that
- Will be able to wirelessly connect to wifi router
- Will have ports to provide internet connection to wired devices
?

If so which one would you recommend?

Basically I dont want to have cable from office room to living room to connect xbox & bluray player to existing network.

Thank you.

 

[DaveMcLain]

What you need is a wireless client bridge. The bridge will act as a wireless client to the router and then allow the wired devices to receive IP addresses etc from the router.

Many routers can do this if they are loaded with a 3rd party firmware such as DD-WRT which has a client bridge mode. I use this setup in a few places with great results.

 

[adeptms]

Dave, very interesting! Thank you for your reply, I'll research that firmware.

Any "ready-to-go" out of the box bridges with router functionality that you can recommend?

 

[DaveMcLain]

The thing is you don't really need any sort of router functions because the box won't be assigning IP addresses etc only passing through DHCP. I'm sure there are some wireless bridges on the market. I know the Linksys WAP54G could act as a client or AP with it's stock firmware but it only has one Ethernet port. With it you would also need to use a switch. Consumer routers like the Linksys WRT54G, Netgear WGR614 and others have the necessary hardware(wireless and a switch with several ports) but they won't do client bridging with the stock firmware.

Most of the WRT54G's that I have came second hand or off of E-Bay usually for about $15. DD-WRT will work with all versions of this hardware except for V7. Later versions came with less memory and they must use the micro versions but that's just fine for what you're trying to do.

Hopefully someone will chime in with an off the shelf solution for you. If not just do some reading on DD-WRT and see what it can do. You'll find that it's not all that difficult to make these boxes do all sorts of useful and interesting things.

 

[thiggins]

As Dave suggested, use a wireless bridge. You can just connect any switch to it for more ports.

11g bridges are fading away, replaced by N products. Here are a few:
Linksys WET610N Wireless-N Ethernet Bridge with Dual-Band Reviewed


D-Link DAP-1522 Review: Dual-band Draft 11n for the Masses?
(this one has a built-in 4 port 10/100/1000 switch)

 

[adeptms]

As Dave suggested, use a wireless bridge. You can just connect any switch to it for more ports.

Thiggins, thank you for reply your & for links to bridges.

I went to walmart & got Linksys WRT54GS2, changed firmware to DD-WRT, switched it to client bridge mode & connected to existing router.

Now I have few questions (seems like the more you do something, the more questions arise from it):

1. How can I connect to new bridge to make changes to it's settings without doing hard reset? As I understand it doesnt really have an IP at this point so I'm not sure if it's even possible now...

2. By some reasons I can get online via wireless only when new bridge is turned off (if I just disconnect from it by unplugging wire it does not really help, I have to turn it off in order for wireless to start working).

3. Is it normal that when I'm connected via wire to new bridge, I get worse grade for my connection from pingtest.net? (1-2% packets get lost & jitter is higher)

4. Is there any benefit to go with bridges posted by Thiggins vs what I've got now? (besides "N" mode - I cant fully use since both my laptops dont support N and I cant really update them yet).

 

[jdabbs]

What IP did you use to access the configuration? If it is the same as your primary router, you will run into problems.

 

[adeptms]

Yes, it is. Both routers provided access to their admin pages on 192.168.1.1. Tonight I'll try turning off primary router and see if bridge will let me in.

 

[thiggins]

Change the IP address on one of the routers. You can't have two devices using the same IP address on the same network.

 

[adeptms]

Tim, thank you for advice Will do.

I'm so grateful for you guys answering my questions, I would be more than happy to contribute to this board, unfortunately the only area where I'm good at is web development & ia. Please let me know if I can do there anything for you.

 

[adeptms]

I changed ip of wireless router to 192.162.1.2 and now everything works
Thank you guys for your help and patience

 

[thiggins]

Thanks for reporting back. Glad you got it sorted out.