wireless access point?

[crazychicken]

I bought a wireless router for my campus dorm room... so like a few rooms on my hall could have wireless in our rooms for our laptops... but its giving me a hard time switching between wired and wireless. What does a wireless access point do? Is it more like a hub for wireless, so we could still get a campus IP, just through wireless? or will it, like the router i have, give us a sub network ip?

any input would be great

thanks
david

 

[ktwebb]

"Is it more like a hub for wireless, so we could still get a campus IP, just through wireless?"

Correct.

 

[Soybomb]

It depends on how you hook it up though too. If you plug it into the campus network via the wan port on the router, wireless clients, and wired clients connected to it should get rfc1918 private IP addresses. If you connect it to the campus network by connection it to any of the other ports than the one one, you should be assigning/being assigned campus ip's. If you choose to do that you need to be absolutely sure you disable the dhcp server and probably at the least change the default password before you plug it into the network.

Might be sure to double check your dorms policy too, at many colleges a wireless accept point will get you disconnected.

 

[ktwebb]

I took the post to read he has a wireless router, but wanted to know what an AP is because perhaps that's what he needs.
Soybomb is correct. You can use your existing AP/Router combo as a stand alone Access Point by bypassing the WAN port completely and using the integrated switch. Make sure to disable the DHCP server on the router.