On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 09:22 -0600, Loren H. Burlingame wrote: > I am setting up a 34 floor condominium with wireless access. I have > found that the Belkin Pre-N access points have a very excellent range > which means I will only need 1 per floor (this has been tested, I > could actually get away with 1 every other floor). The problem lies in > the fact that these devices are very consumer-level and are hard-wired > to only support a single /24 subnet per device while it's firewall is > enabled (which I need in order to block SMB ports from other wireless > users. No, there is no ability to do static routing and they will all > be hooked up in series via Ethernet). > > With a potential of 300+ users I am not comfortable with a single /24. > > The only other option is to basically treat every wireless device as a > NAT/firewall/router with it's own /24 dhcp pool. However, this would > mean that users on the last AP in the daisy-chain will have to go > through 35 NAT gateways before reaching the Internet. > > Does anybody see this as a problem? Pre-N is a bit bleeding edge, and obviously not standard. It will be obsolete when the real N comes out. Reading through forums, there's some concern than Belkin's Pre-N gets its speed by stomping all over the 2.4ghz spectrum, ruining reception for everyone else, I wonder how well a building full of them will get along with each other, let alone any other wireless networks in the area... Maybe you can disable the Pre-N, but then why use pricier pre-N AP's. Is the range really that much better, even without using Pre-N? Have you tried something more conventional, like the WRT54G series or a Belkin F5D7230-4 (Which I've written custom firmware for, which I really should release today... *self plug*) I got my F5D7230-4 for $20 after rebates. The WRT54G series, F5D7230-4, and others based on the same chipset, (Buffalotech, ASUS, etc...) are well known and widely hacked at this point, and thus custom firmware can be written to do absolutely anything you could want it to do. You can make them firewall and route however whatever you want. Apparently the Pre-N's run Linux, but I haven't seen anyone hack custom firmware yet. If I got my hands on one I could possibly be the first to do that too... And if you use the router models instead of AP's, you don't have to hook them all to a switch, because they ARE switches. Or you could use WDS. Which cuts your bandwidth in half, but thats still should be enough to share internet. But I don't know how well WDS scales up to 34 AP's... -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20050324/ede7c6e5/attachment.pgp