Office wide wireless

[Funkstar]

Just bought a bunch of wireless cards for our laptops so we can use wireless hotspots when out traveling. We are now speaking about getting a few access points for the offices and warehouse.

We will need several Access Points, i'm thinking we'll need 4, perhaps 5. They can all be plugged directly into our LAN which goes round the whole site.

the Dlink DWL-2000AP+ looks a good price on Scan. Can this be set up in such a way that collectively they are all the same wireless network? i don't want to have 4 or 5 seperate networks. One of the features is "Multi-Point Bridge mode will allow you to connect multiple wireless LANs together. Other wireless LANs must be using DWL-2000AP+s." does this do what i want?

If not, does anyone have any sugestions about how i can achieve what i want.

many thanks.

[Moby-Dick]

I've never had a whole lot of luck getting Multi AP WLAN's to play properly. The only one I know of that work used a lot of cisco ones and a big big budget

I've tried one of the proprietry roaming functions ( Buffalo ) and while the AP itself ok , you needed to have identical vendor stuff everywhere for it to work properly.

how big is your network ? what sort of other security do you run ? its generally not a great idea to connect AP's directly to the private network.

[Funkstar]

Currently we are running off a 24port switch and not all of those ports are used all the time. However the network is physically quite large as we have two warehouses and a couple of offices in the yard.

If you are saying that i shouldn't have the wireless network as an extension to our wired network, then what on earth would the point be? I want to be able to, for example, take my laptop down to the warehouse and go through our stock system while counting items in stock. I could also get out of our stuffy too-hot office when it is nice weather and sit in the warehouse (or outside) where it is cool and sunny

[Moby-Dick]

it should be on a different segment with a secured authentication. If you think of the wireless segment as inherently insecure and that you have to passthrough authentication from the WLAN to the LAN 802.1x is good for this , especially if you use a radius server then you can have proper roaming capability.

It depends on the level of paranoia you want to use if you make sure you use a good level of encryption ( WPA2 if possible ) then you should be ok. I have a feeling that certain levels of encryption render the proprietyr roaming functions usless. Windows XP SP2 wireless clients are usually quiet intellegent when it comes to multiple AP's , but it will depend on how far apart they are and a few other "x" facorts that always come into play ( and they will annoy you - WiFi is nice but I'd never rely on it )

[Funkstar]

might just forget about this until someone else has a need for it. would save me some hastle

[Moby-Dick]

dont give up just jet

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/...3&categoryid=7

looks like a much better bit of kit than the d-link

[Funkstar]

yeah, looks good. Unfortunitely it is about £250 and might not be a current product, Expansys say it is discontinued.

[dave87]

Hmm, we had some luck using Belkin AP and setting them all with the same SSIDs and using the same encryption - and the laptops we have (using the Intel cards that come with Celeron M laptops) - and they roam quite happily. The only problem we have had is trying to add some netgears into the mix, didn't like it much

That is as long as they are all directly connected to the network, we haven't had much luck bridging them...


Dave