Hi, I'm rather new to 802.11b. I want to setup a neighborhood open wireless network. Not sure yet whether it will be donation supported, or a "split the fees" "honor system" type of arrangement.
The question I have now is technical. I was planning on having a centrally located AP with a high gain antenna on the roof of a centrally located building. I'd like to create an additional subnet from my existing bandwidth with my existing linux based router/firewall. I can do all this easily enough, but the question is how to transmit the signal to the remote rooftop. I really want to avoid using two wireless bridges (one at each location) with a crossover cable connecting from the remote bridge to the remote AP, as I want to keep the cost down to a minimum for this project. I was wondering what would be the downside to using an wireless ethernet bridge, like the Linksys WET11 as an access client, attached to my router, and run a dhcpd, and bind/named on the same box as the router? Would all clients of the remote AP, when broadcasting for bootp or dhcp servers find the one on my router, get configured with the ip, gateway, mask, default route, and dns servers that I provide for them and be able to access the internet via the default route provided? I guess my uneducated idea of the AP, is that it is really just a wireless switch. If we were working in the wired land of ethernet, then having a remote switch on the other side of a bridge is no big deal. the entire bridged network would use the one router. Is my understanding flawed? What would be the downside to this arrangement, vs the added cost of using two point to point wireless bridges with the remote bridge connected to the AP? Is there increased overhead on the network? Does this reduce speed, or signal strength? -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
