On March 18, 2009 at 10:28, Barry Gordon said...
May I ask why you felt it necessary to have two routers and to sub net the LAN? One of my guiding principals is KISS; "Keep it Simple Stupid" ( myself being the subject of the phrase).
I have a very extensive network in my home. It is a single sub net carrying VoIP and normal Ethernet traffic. Actually the VoIP is not on the net, just at the router. There is one Modem to the Cable, one Router with VoIP and 4 ports, 3 100 meg switches for distribution and three WAP's. Two of the WAPs service SSID "A" and one services SSID "B".
There are no firewalls on the LAN so there are no communications issues between hosts on the LAN but extensive protection is provided at the gateway for all external traffic.
The WAP's all run WEP 128 and the house, due to its construction, is very unfriendly to external signals (neighbors or cyber-stalkers wi-fi connection attempts). The total host count on the LAN is about 35 as many things electronic in my home have a micro-controller using TCPIP. One of the Servers runs DHCP merely because my router has a functionally weak DHCP service. One of my WAP's could also have run DHCP but I wanted the freedom of playing with that WAP for experimentation so I went with a software based DHCP.
Why not take the router/wap and replace it with a straight WAP eliminating another set of possible issues
Barry,
I know your views on LAN security because I remember your post in the endless "WPA for pronto" thread. And it does sound like you have a pretty neat set up.
I do not have as much confidence in my knowledge of how to protect my network and I don't live in a house that is unfriendly to external signals. In fact it's buggy with all sorts of outside interference as far as I can tell.
In any case, that is why I decided to create a dedicated pronto subnet. The addition of the other router as a WAP on the pronto subnet was because I was not getting a strong enough signal in Room 2 and I just happened to have a spare router sitting in my office.
I have to add that I also got pretty pissed when I called Linksys support (Bangalore of course) and was told that I would have to buy yet another Linksys product to do what I wanted to do. That made me determined to find out how to use the router as an WAP.;-)
Having said that, if I continue to experience flakey network behavior and I'm convinced that it has to do with the router cross dressing as a WAP, I'll go out and get a dedicated WAP. I'm not that stubborn. :-)
