Incidentally, I'm typing this from my laptop, which I just connected to an SB3 using a crossover cable. Completely painless, and works like a charm.
The lights on the laptop NIC immediately turned on and Windows indicated an active 100 Mbps connection but I initially had no connectivity - then I remembered to activate wireless bridging. I couldn't get to it with the SB3 set up as-is, and I couldn't get back to the networking setup screen, so I power-cycled the SB3. I went through the wireless setup again, and just after the "Connect via wireless" page I got a new option: "Bridge wireless to ethernet". I enabled that, accepted my other setup entries by pressing FWD on the remote, and both the laptop and the SB3 connected perfectly. In fact the connection seems to be faster and definitely more stable than the laptop's own wireless NIC. Obviously it doesn't matter whether the SB3 is on, playing or in standby. As long as it's receiving power it's acting as a bridge. I haven't done any network traffic studies, but I'm curious what it will do if I attempt to saturate the connection. Will it give priority to music playback and throttle down the bridged connection? I hope it will, but as I understand it the bridging feature is quite simple and will probably attempt to pass as many packets as it receives to the connected device. So you probably could starve both devices, but I haven't tested this yet. But this effortless operation is good news for me since I will be using a second Squeezebox in my basement where I have a PC that will require wireless network access. I wanted an SB down there, this saves me the cost of a wireless NIC. In regards to your particular problem, now that it's working like a charm for me, I actually don't have any tools to check what MAC addresses are being passed back to the router. :-) My router is showing 1 connected wireless device having the MAC address of the SB3, as it did before. It does not show all associated MAC addresses, just wireless ones, but the static IP assignments I used for the SB3 and my laptop remain and work fine, including file sharing and SlimServer web page access over the network. In your case I believe wireless bandwidth starvation might become an issue. Your SlimServer will have to stream data to your router through your SB, then back to your SB. They cannot stream data directly between each other, it will have to be through the router. Now, one direction is upload and the other is download, but still, that's a lot of wireless traffic. Since you indicate you are an audiophile, you probably have FLAC files, so automatically you will be wireless-bandwidth-constrained. I will do some network tests and see what speeds I can come up with and (more importantly) if I can get the SB3 to choke on FLAC playback with heavy bridge traffic. -- Mark Lanctot ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19612 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
