Sharing Wireless connection with Wired pcs

[greenwar]

I have a situation that many of you probably have encoutered at some point. I have bunch of wired pcs running in a folding farm 6 to be precise. I recently moved to a townhome and my router is in the ground floor serving wireless connection. Due to asthetic reasons, my pcs will be upstairs and currently I can't wire connections to share wired connections.

What I want to do is setup a wireless receiver on the 2nd floor and share that connection through a wired connection to a switch and then my folding machines can just connect to the wired network upstairs.

I got one pci wireless card and set it up on a pc. This pc has a built in ethernet. Once the wireless card started working, I downloaded sohoconnection and set that up to work as a router. Then I bridged the wireless connection and set it up so that my switch is connected to the ethernet port and the rest of the pcs are able to get to the web. SOHOconnection does not have the ability to set a specific connection to be used to share the connection. I am wondering at this point what should I do.

Is there a hardware solution to this problem? If so please post some links .....

Thanks in advance.

 

[Madwand1]

I guess you had some problem with SOHOConnection that you can't resolve?

Did you check the relevant SC docs? Follow their instructions? Look for contacts?

http://www.servlet.com/soho2/SOHOC-README.html#Overview

Couldn't you use Window's Internet Connection Sharing instead?

If you're ready to give up on ICS and SC, then a "hardware solution" to you problem can be found in many wireless devices that have "client bridge mode" support. They'll do what you're trying to do -- connect to a wireless AP / router, and share that connection to wired clients.

Linksys WRT54GL and siblings with 3rd-party firmware such as DD-WRT can do this (check supported hardware devices notes; read firmware installation notes carefully).

Some wireless access points have this functionality built-in.

Some devices labeled "Wireless Ethernet Converter", "Wireless Print Server", "Wireless Gaming Adapter" do the same thing.

I've used a Netgear WGPS606 and Linksys WRT54G v1 with DD-WRT each at different times to bridge computers that were folding in a back room.

 

[greenwar]

I read that I cannot run ICS if another DHCP server is running? I have a wireless router running as a DHCP server should that be a problem? I was running my router on the same 192.168.x.x ip so I will change that to run on 10.0.x.x and try to setup ics. Right now if I try to setup ICS, it complains that there is another network with the same ip range

Thanks for your reply, I will give ICS one more try. If I have another wireless router, can I just set that to run in client more and get wired connection out of its 4 wired ports? That would solve my problem as well, I guess, if I understood you correctly.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: greenwar
If I have another wireless router, can I just set that to run in client more and get wired connection out of its 4 wired ports?

You'd need a wireless router that supports client bridge mode -- many routers don't; some do with 3rd-party firmware such as DD-WRT.

 

[greenwar]

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...&STARTPAGE=1&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear

Madwand, just like you said, found a howto forum. Thanks a lot. Appreciate your input.

Also your comment:

Originally posted by: Madwand1
Here's a quote from the DD-WRT forums (Broadcom based hardware / HOWTO: Client Bridged Mode):

DD-WRT's "client bridge" mode" is not a transparent bridge.
Only one single ethernet device is properly supported behind the
router running in "client bridge" mode. (It should have been baptized
"client adapter mode" instead!) In the old forum we already had
endless discussions about this subject. Note that this is a technical
limitation of the 802.11 standard, rather than a deficiency of DD-WRT.

To create a true transparent bridge, with multiple ethernet devices
at both sides, use WDS.

The WAG54G apparently supports WDS; you might try that if you haven't already.

FWIW, I haven't had any problems with simple Windows networking using DD-WRT "Client Bridged Mode", but I can see that it isn't transparent -- all devices behind the bridge show the bridge's MAC address.

Will someone be able to explain what are the implications of not using transparent connections?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Madwand1]

Go to the source. The DD-WRT how-to's are simpler to read. The biggest difficulty with DD-WRT is getting it flashed correctly -- you should read and follow the notes for that.

I think that worrying about "transparent bridging" for most of us is not useful. Folding works fine through the bridge. Basic Windows networking works fine. Web browsing works fine. What more do you want?

Specific on-line gaming, P2P? Perhaps you'd be better off asking about such needs specifically instead of trying to digest theoretical details.

Here's the source:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=68&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0