philippe::niquille | irregular niche market thoughts

You want to connect several Access Points without cabling them? So read this quick and dirty howto:

Flash all AP’s with Sveasoft’s Alchemy firmware (here). Why not Freeman (the newest one)? I experienced a big performance drop when boosting the Acces Point to 251 mW.

One Access Point must remain the primary DHCP server and internet gateway. So disable DHCP on all the other Access Points. Also be sure to do the same with the firewall.
Most important of all, is to run all devices on the same channel and same SSID (to permit a smooth roaming between the Access Points).

Then edit the WDS section (Wireless tab) of each Acces Point and choose the following:

• P2P
• the mac address of the other Access Point, you can get that one either by using the survey tool (status tab, wireless) or reading the small sticker on the ap itself.
• As ip choose something which is not in de DHCP range (ex. 192.168.0.250, 251)

After that you should be abble to see a small status indicator called WDS with mac address and a signal strenght meter filed under the wireless status tab if the Access Points are in range of each other.

Finally apply the most important settings:

• login to your Access Point trough ssh (enable it on the admin page)
• enter ifconfig and look for a wds device
• if so, add the wireless bridge with brctl addif br0 wds0.2 (do the same ex. for wds0.3 if the current device has two wds bridges)
• and finaly add those changes permanetly to the ram (so you can reboot without loosing the settings) with nvram set rc_startup=’/usr/sbin/brctl addif br0 wds0.2′ and nvram commit.
  Verify the commit with nvram show | grep startup.

Encryption: I’m not sure, but I think that Alchemy has problems with WPA/WDS - I managed to setup my WDS with WEP/128bit without any problems. Be sure to choose a strong WEP key with special chars (aldough it can be cracked very fast, I know :-))

Now you should have a working wireless WDS network. For example test it by pinging the 192.168.0.250 ip from 192.168.0.251 (the second app, not wired).

Voilà!

references:
http://www.sorgonet.com
http://www.olotwireless.net
http://thisisfanzoo.com
http://www.altred.net