Newbie Question

[Premier]

Hi all,
I need some very serious and straight information. My current OS provider has left me high and dry as regards support. Basically what I have is two wrap boards with wlm54ag atheros cards in each of them. What I was attempting to do was sent a 2.4 backhaul signal say on channel 1 from my home town to a mountain site via a wrap board to another wrap board with 2 atheros cards in it. one for backhaul and one for public access. the public atheros card will be running on channel 11. i have these installed already but they will not mesh even though signal levels are -72 each way. my current operating system provider has stopped responding to my support questions so at the last minute i have to dump them. I am all too new to star-os so will someone please please point me in the right direction as to what software i require. i am now reading as much as i can in this very short time. many thanks

[sligbot]

Try searching the forums for what you are interested in. There is a lot of valuable information all over the place in these forums. If your question is concerning routing vs bridging, the standard (and best) answer is to route everything. If you don't know how to do that (or aren't 100% sure) use the search bar to find more information. If you require specific help, post more specific details about your network setup.
Hope all goes well.
Rich

[tog]

You'll want to put StarV3 on your WRAPs. I'm using it on some WRAPs and it works fine, quite similar to the WAR platform but with less horsepower. (266MHz ARM CPU + 3 network co-processors is faster than 266MHz Pentium-class)

To put StarV3 on your WRAPs you'll have to burn the StarOS v3 image to flash cards, stick the flash cards into the WRAPs and use putty or some other ssh client to get into them via ethernet at 192.168.1.1. (set your PC to 192.168.1.2)

Then you need to license them at http://www.license-keys.com/ to activate StarV3's abilities.

[Premier]

hi thanks for the replies lads. well thats my first question answered anyway, "what version of star-os works on the wrap platform"! Thank you.
basically what i have is a dsl line, 5 meg down 512 kbps up which is in my hometown. connected to this i would want a "gateway" so to speak serving a "repeater" node on the mountain site. This node has a parabolic antenna pointed for my hometown which is being used as a backhaul. connected to the other atheros card on the repeater node is a sector antenna for public access. i would of liked 5Ghz for backhaul, but tree coverage will not allow this, tried n' tested. 2.4g however is good enough with signal both ways at -71. 3 things im worried about...Firstly learning a new platform all over again. I have looked at the screenshots, is it hard to get used too? is there any programming scripts which i would have to know? Secondly will both box's mesh or link ok? this is my original problem. Thirdly, i used to use just plain old dhcp for clients to connect to. Honestly i have no idea about pppoe. is it difficult. will my regular cpe units handle it or can i just use dhcp for my clients as before? Thanks in advance.

[tog]

I think you'll find using putty and ssh that the StarV3 interface is pretty easy to figure out. Any "scripts" that you might need for bandwidth-limiting, NAT and firewall come with heavily-commented default examples.

You certainly shouldn't have any problems hauling a connection over to someplace else and then having the remote location set up with an access point on the second card. The WAR boards that Valemount sells have a 533MHz 4-port version available that works real nice if you need more than two radios.

If you're doing a 2.4GHz backhaul, I would suggest using 2x cloaking so it doesn't eat up too much of your 2.4GHz spectrum and is more interference-resistant and slightly stronger than a standard 20MHz-wide 802.11b/g channel. 2x cloaking uses a 10MHz-wide channel so if you had a 2x-cloaked backhaul on channel 1, you would be free to use channels 4 and up non-cloaked. When you are backhauling 2.4GHz in on the same tower much less the same board, for best performance you'll want to get the backhaul and AP as far away from each other as possible, though, backhaul on channel 1, AP on channel 11 for example.

When bringing up your link, first and foremost make sure you set the "distance" correctly plus 2 miles on both ends. If this is a 10-mile shot, set it to 12. Same for your AP, if your furthest customer will be 4 miles from the AP, set the AP's distance to 6.

You can use DHCP, no reason to use PPPoE.

The big standard featureful ISC DHCP server is available in StarV3 which allows you to deny responding to unknown clients and you can manually enter client MAC addresses and even assign static IPs via DHCP if you want. I use ISC DHCP server and manually add client MACs in addition to using 104-bit WEP shared-key which works happily with other 802.11b/g standard clients.

Here is the ISC DHCP configuration that I use, feel free to make use of it yourself:

option domain-name "yourdomain.com";
option domain-name-servers 1.1.1.1, 1.1.1.2;
server-name "site1.yourdomain.com";
get-lease-hostnames true;
deny bootp;
deny unknown-clients;
authoritative;
one-lease-per-client true;
ddns-update-style none;
ddns-updates off;

default-lease-time 3600;
max-lease-time 3600;
min-lease-time 3600;

subnet 2.2.2.0 netmask 255.255.255.192 {
range 2.2.2.2 2.2.2.50;
option broadcast-address 2.2.2.63;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.192;
option routers 2.2.2.1;
}

host static-client {
hardware ethernet 00:02:03:04:05:06;
fixed-address 2.2.2.51;
}

host dynamic-client { hardware ethernet 00:01:02:03:04:05; }