Wireless/Wireline Mixed network problems

jedi_master_ss · n00b Joined: 12 Feb 2004 Posts: 25

I have 4 computers that i want to be able to access each other and the internet. I have a Linksys WPC55AG (PCMCIA card), a WMP54G (PCI card), and a WRT54G (router). These are the wireless and i know how to get them to correctly connect to the network in both windows and linux. The problem I can't find a solution for is I have one machine in the same room as the router and the cable modem, 2 in the basement (1Gentoo & 1 XP) and the 4th is the laptop which can be anywhere in the house. I only have 1 WMP54G and will have it in one of the machines in the basement and i want that machine to allow the other one to connect to the house network and the internet and if possible be on the same subnet as the other machines. Both machines in the basement also have a Netgear FA311 ethernet card in them to allow them to connect to a 24 port switch to allow visitors/friends to plug in w/o problems (example lan parties).

Mark Nye · n00b Joined: 14 Feb 2005 Posts: 39 Location: Ithaca, NY

So if I understand this right, you have a wireless router, and you have three machines that have wireless cards. One of the wireless machines (basement) also has an secondary ethernet card, and you're thinking of extending your wireless subnet using that machine, such that a number of additional machines could be connected via ethernet to your basement box, and all share the same inside subnet.

Is that about right?

jedi_master_ss · n00b Joined: 12 Feb 2004 Posts: 25

You got the right concept but only 2 machines have wireless, the laptop and one of the 2 machines in the basement. The wireless card can be moved between the machines in the basement to meet the demands of the solution. Machine 4, shown on the right side of the drawing is a wireline connected to the router.

Mark Nye · n00b Joined: 14 Feb 2005 Posts: 39 Location: Ithaca, NY

Well I can tell you for sure that what you need is some clever netfilter (iptables) script to do the job. One basement machine will get the wireless card, and it will share its connection with the other basement computers that are attached via your switch. I'm just not sure how to keep the same subnet going on both sides of this box.

One question: will the remaining basement computers need to pull ip addresses off your router via DHCP, or will you use static configurations?

I'll poke around with this later today, because I'm interested in doing a similar thing with an old laptop that happens to have both a wireless card and an ethernet port.

jedi_master_ss · n00b Joined: 12 Feb 2004 Posts: 25

Since the router already is providing the DHCP addresses to the subnet it would probably be the easiest way unless you think that having the basement machine acting as a DHCP with the router just being the gateway would be the better solution.

Also i have thoughts that bridging might work however i have heard some people saying that you can only bridge wireline to wireles not wireless to wireline like we want in this problem.

ebike · Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 9:03 pm Post subject:

Hi,
I have just set up bridging between my wired and wireless networks on the server. You must have the latest masked baselayout and bridge-utils,
but it works just great.
See the thread:https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-307239.html
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jedi_master_ss · n00b Joined: 12 Feb 2004 Posts: 25

I had been reading your thread for a little bit after i posted mine. I wasn't sure which options to add to the kernel but after adding a couple random items that i thought would work and after upgrading to the -r2 baselayout, i was able to get it to work for a few moments. However that when i ran into something odd a kernel panic, and from what i can tell the kernel panic can be attributed to the ndiswrapper but i can't be 100% sure.
I know for a fact that it worked long enough for the windows xp box behind it to be able to get an ip but the kernel panic happened before i was able to test whether or not it could browse the internet.

I'll try to test it more later but there were some other quirks like, if i tried booting the machine it would try to load br0 before it loaded wlan0 or eth0 even though i have the depends section that UberLord said to put in the net file. Also it wouldn't always bring up the wpa_supplicant option correctly so therefore it wouldn't always retrieve an IP from the AP.