Router as an AP?

Hi all,

I was wondering if it is possible to get a router set up to act as an access point. I have a wired network and a wireless router and i was thinking that i
could set the ip of the wireless router to one in the network and put a range of ip's in the dhcp pool higher than the range in my wired routers dhcp pool.

I know that routers don't forward broadcast messages but I didn't know if there was any way to get the router to allow it. This router has WDS functionality and It can be set as the root AP but I believe that this is just for extending an AP's range but I thought that if it could do that, it could act as an AP in some way.

Thoughts?

Thanks for any info.

one time i ran 2 wireless routers together... different SSIDs though on different sides of the house..

my first router was 192.168.1.xx
an my secondary was 192.168.2.xx

although if you are going to do that, i reccoment setting aside a reserved address in your dhcp server of your wired router. and setting your wireless router to static IP... or see if you can turn NAT off on your wireless router.. thats how you changed my old belkin from router to AP.. when NAT was off it would connect and look to my internet connection for another IP.. and if it was looking at your wired router it should grab an IP and send it on by...

back up your settings before you do any experimenting though.. if you screw something up its easier to reload then reset everything in your wired router


one question though.

if you want a wireles network why dont you just hook up your wireless router and leave the wired router out of it.. if you need more ports grab a hub or switch.. relatively inexpensive

Plug your wired LAN connection into one of the internal interfaces on the router/switch and turn off dhcp on your router. Your wireless clients will pick up an address from your wired LANs dhcp server.

I'm not real clear on what you're trying to do...
I have a wireless router and two networked computers in one room...
my roommate has a wireless router and several networked computers in another room.

I was able to flash the firmware of my router to get it to connect to the other wireless router so we could share the internet connection.

If that sounds like something that might be usefull to you, you can find out more about it here:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php?title=WDS_Linked_router_network> click

Depending on the router, you can change it's function from router to access point or wireless bridge. I also used the dd-wrt firmware as faqt has mentioned.

Otherwise, stevel's method should also do it.

Most routers will behave as a wireless access point anyway. As mentioned by stevel, you need to disable the router's DHCP server.

I use this configuration:
- Disable DHCP server
- Assign a static IP for the LAN interface of the router (for management) that is on the right block and doesn't clash. Connect one of the LAN ports to your other switch / router as necessary.
- Assign a static (unused) address for the "WAN" interface of the router in another netblock - make sure this doesn't clash with any other network you have. *Don't plug it into anything*
- Enable the wifi

Wifi clients then get an IP address from your LAN DHCP server, transparently, and can route through your conventional (wired) router.

Mine is a Linksys BEFW11S4 which is a rather old 802.11b one, but it works fine.

Mark

Sorry for the late reply but i just started doing this at the places.

The full explanation of what is going on is this:

I have connected the wireless router to the hub which is connected to a cisco switch. There is no dhcp for the wired network so i have statically assigned the wan interface of the wireless to 10.16.67.100, the lan ip of the wireless router is 10.15.67.100. The ip of the cisco router is 10.16.67.1 and i can successfully ping that router and get access to the internet. That was originally my problem which got fixed when i gave the wireless some public dns servers but these places have a headquarters where they connect to the terminal servers at their hq through vpn and there is no access to that network. The network id of their hq is 10.16.64.0 and the dns servers are .15 and .17. I'm not sure if I need to change something in the cisco router here or in the wireless here or if the router at their hq is blocking it somehow.

Sorry if this sounded rushed, Im in a hurry to get somewhere. I hope I explained that good enough tho

Based on the information you provided I'm going to take a stab at this and guess that the problem is that you've plugged in the WAN interface of your router effectively creating a firewall and seperate network.

I assume you have a point to point vpn connection with the other office using your cisco router... Whats happening now is that the router is recieving traffic destined to the 10.15.67.100 network (how is this network subnet?) of which your router has no access-list and no route.. the router is going to drop these packets.

You have two options,
1. (easy way) DO NOT USE THE WAN INTERFACE ON YOUR WIRELESS ROUTER! Plug the router into your network using one of its internal interfaces, essentially turning the "router" into a "switch" :D Assign all clients connecting to the wireless router an IP address using the 10.60.67.1 scheme.
2. (hard way) learn about routes and access-lists and how they are used in point to point vpn connections.

Good luck