[smartBridges] Why not to use smartBridge...

[Rick Kosick]

ï So far I've come up with three good reasons to not continue to use smartBridges but I'm open to suggestions for fixing these problem. Pardon my frustration but I have 3 years of wireless experience and its taking me more than 10 hours of fiddling to get a simple Wireless Bridge to Wireless Bridge up and running and I am sitting here with more problems than solutions right now.   1) Last week I plugged the ethernet side of an APPO into an APCC PNET4 ethernet surge supressor where there where three other devices plugged in. This caused severe packet loss on the other devices. Pinging the other devices between each other would result in 4 out of 10 pings timeing out.   SOLUTION:    Bypass the ethernet surge supressor.   2) Right now I have two APPO's configured in Wireless Bridge mode (which won't work, see #3). At my NOC side its plugged into a D-Link DES3226 Managed Switch. If I put the APPO into Access Point mode, it KILLS the traffic on my switch entirely to the point where workstations and servers can barely reach each other. As soon as I unplug the APPO's ethernet connection from the switch, immediately everything goes back to normal. This has happened twice now in my quest to get my wireless link working.   SOLUTION:    No idea. Maybe avoid Access Point mode?   3) I have to admit I did enjoy 3 minutes of Wireless Bridge mode where everything worked as it was expected, but I got adventerous and enabled WEP. This did not work out for some reason and now, after disabling WEP... I cannot get the Wireless Bridge mode to work again. I've reset to Defaults and started over, still nothing. I simply cannot get Wirless Bridge to Wireless Bridge mode to work at this point. I've been through the "recycling both sides", "double checking MAC#'s", etc. You'd think that if this was going to work at all, I would have accidentally made it work by now.   SOLUTION:    None as of yet.       Clearly, when considering points #1 and #2 above, there is more happening on the ethernet side of the link than just ethernet. Something is different than a standard ethernet connection because this radio clearly caused major packet loss between the other devices plugged into am ethernet surge supressor. Maybe power is leaking through from the PowerShot device? And, its ability to completely bring a managed switch to its knees just reassures this.   === Rick Kosick StarLinX Internet Service