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krankie

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Wireless / Networking help needed

I have an interesting little network project that I would like some advice with.  To set the scene, the location in question is a sports stadium.

At the moment we have a D-Link DSL-604+ in the main office area, which serves one PC on a wired connection (there are four wired LAN ports available on this device).  The rest are served wirelessly by the same device. This device also has a built in DSL modem function which provides connection to the internet.  It is set up with an IP of 192.168.0.1 and subnet mask 255.255.255.0. DHCP is enabled on this device to provide leased IPs to both the wired PC and the wirless PCs.

Originally we had hoped to use this device to provide wireless LAN connectivity to trusted press members in the press area, such as our own webmasters.  However there is a breezeblock wall in between the office area and the stand and signal was unreliable.  One minute you get a good signal, the next it drops the connection completely.  To overcome this we installed a D-Link DSL-900AP+ access point above the ceiling tiles of an sponsors box near the press area, and connected this via ethernet to the DSL-604+.  This device has static IP 192.168.0.50 and has DHCP disabled.  Its clients are provided IPs by the DSL-604+.

We now need to provide connectivity to a PC in the opposite stand, some 150 metres away. This PC is located underneath the stand, so the concrete terraces plus distance mean no signal is possible from the current setup.  However there is a direct line of sight across the pitch from another sponsors box located just above this location.

We are planning to relocate the DSL-900AP+ to the far side sponsors box and reconfigure it to provide one end of a wireless bridge to a new piece of equipment that we will purchase for the near side sponsors box. This new equipment will be connected to the DSL-604+ using the existing ethernet cable. Ideally we would like this new piece of equipment to provide two functions:

Wireless bridge to the far side.
Wireless Access point to the press area on the near side.

Is there one piece of D-Link kit that can provide this new function? I believe we will need a two radio piece of kit, one that can provide bridge and access point functions simultaneously. Or alternatively two new boxes, one for the bridge and one for the access point?

Or, do we just need an access point, and configure the far side DSL-900AP+ as a wireless client, rather than a bridge?

Also, we would like a solution if possible to that enables us to provide internet access to any member of the press.  For this to be possible, clients of the new press access point must be able to get to the internet only, and not to anywhere else on the LAN.  I don't know whether this is possible using just subnet masks or if we would have to VPN all of our PCs to achieve this? The sticking point here may be the all-in-one simplicity of the original DSL-604+.

Suggestions and a few alternative solutions would be much appreciated.

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y1381

Can you hook up an external antenna to you D-Link routeer / model .. If you can you could try to hook it up with two 4.9Ghz directional antennae or one 4.9 Omni antenna. I know the Cisco Aironet is capable have being attached with an external antenna.

hth

--Yatharth
Actually 2 D-Link AP will be cheaper than one Proxim, but there is one way how to do it
. You should buy 2 Linksys wireless routers and use following configuration.

Internet ----Linksys (with defined static route to segment 192.168.1.x internal scope 192.168.0.x) ----- some access points on segments (DI604 can be used as one AP with disabled DHCP)

 900AP+  (in client mode, with directional antenna) -=== cross cable ====- Linksys (with disabled NAT) - and internal scope 192.168.1.x
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lopezc

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Not strictly abandoned, just no closure option that fits my view of the answers.

I would be happy to award partial points to lopezc who had the best go at speccing out the equipment we would need, and detailing how it should be set up, though he had us bridging the pitch with Ethernet cable which would not be practical.

I do appreciate I should have come back and pointed this out to let him have another go but by that time we were already talking about reducing the scope of the project to minimise the cost.

For the record, we abandoned the press box access idea, mostly due to cost, and just went with an additional DWL-900AP+ on the far side stand which was set up as a repeater to the one on the near side.  In addition we bought a directional antenna for the near side stand access point to boost the signal to the repeater.  Works like a charm, basically a strategically placed repeater to get the signal round the concrete structure of the stand..