This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Rick DeNatale. Original Post: Off Topic - Of Wires, Radios, Airports, and Open Source Feed Title: Talk Like A Duck Feed URL: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/articles.atom Feed Description: Musings on Ruby, Rails, and other topics by an experienced object technologist. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Rick DeNatale Latest Posts From Talk Like A Duck

This past Monday, which happened to be my plenty-seventh birthday, I managed to win an Apple AirPort Express in the end-of-year raffle. I’d been looking for a way to extend the range of my WiFi network here at DenHaven manor. Discussing this at the meeting led me to investigate configuring it as a WDS endpoint. A bit of googling indicated that this should work, although I might need to use WEP encryption rather than WPA/PSK.

After trying for three days to get my prize from Monday night, and my Linksys WRT54G router running OpenWrt to communicate via WDS, with or without either form of encryption. I gave up and went another route.

Yesterday’s attempt was to do a major upgrade of OpenWRT from the old White Russian release, to the latest stable Kamikaze release. I won’t go into the details, but there have been major changes to the configuration approach between those releases, which had held me back, but I figured that since the old firmware was quite old, I might be successful with the new.

Alas! no joy.

So this morning I started investigating puttingdd-wrt, another open-source firmware system on the Linksys. While reading their docs, I started thinking about other ways to skin the cat. When we built our house about six years ago, we put in a pretty extensive structured wiring system, so I’ve got cat-5 ports many places in the house (of course I’m always finding places where I’d like another one).

So now, I’ve got the Airport express wired into the home LAN in a configuration like this:

Both the WRT54G and the Airport Express are configured as wireless access points, neither is running DHCP, which is supplied by one of the machines on the wired LAN. Both access points are configured with the same ESSID, but are on different radio channels.

So far, it seems to be working well. It’s confirmed my original belief in the value of having both wired and wireless infrastructure.

And the Airport Express will come in handy for other things as well. Tomorrow I’m planning to participate in the Radiant Sprint and I’ll be bringing the AirPort Express with me to contribute to WiFi access for the participants.

Thanks TMUG!