Got myself in a pickle.

[Beebe]

So I got a job hooking up a hotel. They have 3 buildings and an RV park which needs covering with wireless for customer's laptops. I thought easy enough, I'll just use my old wrap boards I've had repaired, slap the latest version of staros V2 on them and I can use CM9 cards to shoot from the main building to each other building and repeat using a board with a CM9 and a prism card for the AP.

So I set it all up, I used rootennas to backhaul and 9dbi omnis to repeat. I set everything in the same bridge group to bridge everything back to the DSL router. There was plenty of signal to each repeater.

Well it worked a bit, but was unreliable and inconsistant and in fact I could no longer get into the boards I'd set up. I fought with it for ages and it just seemed to be getting worse.

Anyhow, I figured I'd have more success if I routed it. So I tried configuring one for NAT. Only trouble was, when I turned DHCP on to assign the client's IP addresses, my laptop would rarely be able to get an address assigned. This was just from a wrap board with a prism card in it.

So I can't route without a working DHCP server, and I can't bridge apparently. Does anyone have any other ideas? Do I need to try a different OS on the boards or am I just missing something here?

I can't set it up like my wisp network obviously since I don't control the client radios, and I have to provide dhcp, and I don't have public IPs available.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Roger

[palmczak]

Not sure how you are natting or where.

My suggestion is to route the whole network and nat everything at the gateway. The gateway can be a WRAP V2 or V3 or what ever.

If the routed network is reliable and many clients can be natted at the gateway with excellent results.

Joe

[lonnie]

I guess you did not see the other RV park that asked for ideas.

I have deleted everything else that I had written, so just follow Joe's advice. OK?

[Beebe]

As I said in my original post I can't route anything unless I have a working DHCP server to assign the IPs in each subnet. For some reason the DHCP server on v2 with prism wasn't working properly. I'd connect with my linux laptop and it would not obtain an IP address. I borrowed the hotel owner's windows laptop and it tried for ages before saying "limited or no connectivity" and then it got an IP a few seconds later.

It has to work flawlessly for hotel guests. Am I doing something wrong with the DHCP, or is it really not working right in v2? I think I'll try this again from scratch, I had a lot of perculiar problems yesterday and lost access to several boards. Maybe it will work this time.

I would be using v3 except that it doesn't support prism cards, and I understand Prism is more compatible in a situation where you don't control the clients.

Thanks,
Roger

[palmczak]

I can't speak for the compatability of prism vs atheros. I have both types of cards in use and both work. However in a hotspot scenario I am convinced nothing works flawlessly. (actually expand that to life)

If you suspect trouble with ISC dhcp, use dhcp auto auth. It works very well and is mucho easier to configure. (at the cost of features) I have seen where in a bridged network some clients have a hard time getting DHCP IP. As near as we can tell it seems to be a time out waiting for DHCP server. (the client stops waiting and auto-configures) The biggest problem was with MAC's although I have seen it with windows machines. In the hotspots we operate now each AP serves a block of IP's usually a /26. these are all natted in the gateway, everything runs RIP.

It works very well but have not achieved flawless yet.

[lonnie]

There is NO wireless client bridging in v2. SHEESH. I hope somebody eventually gets that FACT. v2 has support for PSEUDO bridging and your whole design is wrong because of that. DHCP cannot work unless it gets the MAC of the client unmodified and pseudo bridging messes with the MAC.

Atheros will provide better results than any other radio. Laptops are not quite the same as poorly coded client units and using the latest V3 2080 release you'll have a good system. The upcoming driver will be even better, but it is a few more weeks out. It is in local use and we are fixing issues as they surface, and it is not ready for prime time, but getting close.

If you used V3 and ISC DHCP on a routed network, then you would have the same design and setup that we use, and I can certainly say it works.

[rafamous]

My laptop would rarely associate with my old prism AP's. Switched to atheros and no problem connecting.

[tog]

If you need a "campus network" type setup where laptops are connecting to APs, I have to say that Atheros in v3 as an AP seems pretty compatible (better than v2's Atheros driver) and it's what I would recommend using.

I also do recommend using ISC dhcpd even for basic dynamic allocation, it is the most reliable and compatible DHCP server. udhcpd (dhcp auto-auth) works most of the time but ISC dhcpd seems to work all of the time. (So long as you're not trying to use StarOS v2 pseudo-bridging in between the client and the DHCP server.)

Also, for small networks we use v3's WDS and bridge the two or three APs together so clients can roam from AP to AP and it works great.

[palmczak]

I hope I did not misunderstand but in reading between the lines to me it sounds like the network is bridging (psuedo) the AP (client) interface to the backhaul interface. They want 1 single DHCP server for the whole network.

While it took a little getting used to We have now come to like the fact that each AP hands out a different subnet we can quickly locate the AP a person is using since we know what block each AP is serving.

Having the internet gateway NAT IP subnets that it is not directly connected to (or serves via dhcp) is where people stumble I think...



There is NO wireless client bridging in v2. SHEESH. I hope somebody eventually gets that FACT. v2 has support for PSEUDO bridging and your whole design is wrong because of that. DHCP cannot work unless it gets the MAC of the client unmodified and pseudo bridging messes with the MAC.

Atheros will provide better results than any other radio. Laptops are not quite the same as poorly coded client units and using the latest V3 2080 release you'll have a good system. The upcoming driver will be even better, but it is a few more weeks out. It is in local use and we are fixing issues as they surface, and it is not ready for prime time, but getting close.

If you used V3 and ISC DHCP on a routed network, then you would have the same design and setup that we use, and I can certainly say it works.

[rafamous]

That's the clue I've been looking for.

One of my hotels have been complaining for several years about losing dhcp. I tried every kind of router possible and finally built a Monowall. They said it improved much after that but still from time to time they get kicked off.

It must be the fact that the three AP's shooting down into the hotel are simply v2 in bridge mode going down to a the router. DHCP depends on mac addresses to do it's thing, and suedo bridging does a poor job at such a task.

So I would say changing the AP's to v3 and use wds would do the trick. As that would act just like an ethernet cable down to the Monowall router.

[Beebe]

BTW I upgraded everything to v3 and I routed everything (like I wanted to do in the first place but couldn't because I couldn't get the DHCP server to work in v2).

Now everything works great.

Thanks,
Roger