I'm working on switching our gear over to a nice wireless mesh network instead of router1, router2, etc.

I have been using DDWRT on our repeaters and checked it's WDS capability, but it seems to be a single ethernet connection for internet then everything else is just a mesh of wifi repeaters. Since the building is already wired I would prefer to run one seamless SSID, but have the routers share authentication information over the ethernet - possible?

6/28/2010 4:22:07 AM

the dd-wrt WDS implementation is pretty clunky. if you want one big network, you can do it a couple ways. A major determining factor is what your backhaul looks like. Are all your APs wired into the LAN or do you need to do a wireless backhaul in some areas?

you can set the dhcp server on each router/AP to give addresses in unique subnets that don't overlap with the other dhcp servers and then just set the appropriate mask when you're done. then put all the access points on the same channel and same ssid with the same password.

you can turn off dhcp on all your access points but one and go for a hub and spoke design and then put all the access points on the same channel and same ssid with the same password.

if you want every router to know what's going on with every other router even though there are hidden nodes, you need something like a central server running 802.1x (think ncsu nomad) assuming you don't want a reattachment when move from 2bar AP1 to 5bar AP2. One irritating thing is some driver/OS implementations do not automatically hop to the higher powered signal of the same ssid when they get into a lower power/high packetloss condition with the one they're already connected to.

6/28/2010 9:28:07 AM

^all of our AP's can be connected to backhaul, and I can set it up with a single DHCP no problem.

Currently our building is a 100,000 foot warehouse converted to a YMCA, our 'section' and a storage house for documents for some government agency. So naturally there are 3 independent wifi networks, all that we built, but fed through 3 time warner connections. I know it sounds stupid, it is stupid, but it was this way before we arrived and I haven't succeeded in getting people to trust us with their network.

However it doesn't matter because the YMCA is moving out and the data storage people are moving upstairs for more space. So now we get the whole building and I'm changing over to a mesh.

Here's what I would like to do: mesh network, all backhaul over ethernet to our virtual LAN, fed through existing hardware firewall and router. The crux of the problem is that the DD-WRT implementation doesn't appear to allow ethernet backhaul. It sounds so simple, but I don't want to spend $5000 doing it and google has been useless thus far.

[Edited on June 28, 2010 at 11:36 AM. Reason : maybe I'm naming it wrong - I need a seamless network, not a mesh of wifi]

6/28/2010 11:34:28 AM

you can do wireless mesh with ddwrt, but that's not what you need if you can wire all these APs into the same VLAN. all you need to do is run them in AP-only mode and have a dhcp server configured on the wired VLAN. that dhcp server could be just another linksys router if you really wanted. just set it to AP mode only (effectively a wireless bridge), disable dhcp, and set the SSID/channel/security to be the same on all of them

6/28/2010 9:30:05 PM

that simple, eh? I was expecting something complicated that rewrites the AP MAC addresses to something the same or something crazy.

Will attempt. THANKS.

6/29/2010 12:08:35 AM

nah, the wireless stack on the client should handle all that
as long as the essid is the same, it assumes it can handoff

fast bss is useful if you're doing any sort of 802.1x/radius stuff
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11r-2008

6/29/2010 4:29:56 AM

^thanks for posting that, I could not remember the name "radius" to save my freaking life last night when doing more research.

6/29/2010 11:31:25 PM