[TriLUG] WRT54G as WAP

[Shane O'Donnell]

First off, 802.11 is very unworthy.  ;-)

Functionally, this configuration should work fine.  The WiFi radio interface
is actually configured on the same VLAN (yes, the ethernet switch on board
has hidden VLAN functionality!) as the four physical interfaces, so there
should really be no IP issues (assuming all of your clients are
appropriately configured).

There are some situations (which escape me right now) where the WRT54G's
internal interface does not respond appropriately if the WAN interface is
not configured.  Note that this doesn't mean it has to be used (or even have
anything plugged into it), it just needs to be configured with an IP
address.  This may be specific to one of the alternative firmware loads, but
I'm not sure.

>From a Linux perspective, the five-port switch on board (ADM6996, depending
somewhat on the version of the WRT54G) has all interfaces (four physical and
one WiFi) as part of the same bridge group, so IP connectivity between these
devices should not be hindered whatsoever by the device itself.  Recheck
your client configs.

Shane O. 

-----Original Message-----
From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On Behalf
Of Rick DeNatale
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2004 9:19 AM
To: trilug at trilug.org
Subject: [TriLUG] WRT54G as WAP

Please no flames about the unworthiness of 802.11.

I just got a Linksys WRT54G which I'm trying to use as an access point
instead of a router.
A bit of googling indicated that this SHOULD work. The advice all
seemed to be to 1) connect only to the lan side switch ports on the
WRT54G, and 2) disable it's DHCP server.

First I direct connected to the WRT54G and changed it's ip address
from it's default of 192.168.1.1/24 to 192.168.0.12/24 so that it's on
the same subnet as the rest of the lan, and disabled it's dhcp server.

After than I connected it to the LAN. I ignored the WAN port, and
connected it to my lan (which connects to my ISP via a Netgear FVS318
gateway at 192.168.0.11 by the way), via one of the four switch ports
on the WRT54G.

I can now see it's web server at 192.168.0.12 from machines on the
lan. I then proceeded to set up ssid, WEP keys, etc.

Then I went to a windoze laptop and set the security there so the card
driver says it's connected via 802.11g the card is an AirLink+ 802.11g
Wireless CardBus adapter.

However, I can't ping either 192.168.0.12, or 192.168.11. And of
course the laptop isn't seeing the DHCP server on the Netgear either.

I've also tried this with an SMC2632W, which acts the same way, albeit
with an 802.11b connection.

I've played around a bit with the WAN side settings, although they
really shouldn't matter since I'm not using that interface on the
WRT54G.

Does anyone have any ideas on what's going on, or how to make this
work?  I got the WRT54G with the idea that I might want to hack it in
the future, since it's open source, but I'd rather get it up and
working first!
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