Be Excellent To Each Other

My home network is being added and modified to and some of it is being a little bit quirky. I'd like some advice if there's a better way to set it up.



Currently, the WRT54GL is set to subnet 255.255.255.0 handing out IP address in the 192.168.1.1xx range. The Access Point has a fixed IP of 192.168.1.2 and is on subnet 255.255.0.0 handing out 192.168.1.2xx range. This works perfectly well for everything concerned apart from the fact Windows can't make Workgroups across different subnets, scuppering file sharing across my network unless I type in the IP address manually, which I don't want to do.

The AP is in Station-Infrastructure mode, and the router is in Gateway/Access Point mode.

Before that, I had it set up in a simple way so that the DHCP server in the access point was turned off, and everything was set to the same subnet. This worked for a little bit but at seemingly random points the DHCP wasn't giving out addresses to anything on the wired side of the Access Point.

I realise I could just set static IPs to the wired side of the Access Point and it'd work but then uPnP stops working properly and it's a pain the arse to deal with opening and closing ports for Live, BitTorrent, etc.

If anyone has any ideas of a better way to make it work I'd love to hear them.

The WRT54GL can be flashed to any firmware necessary, but is currently running Tomato 1.22. The equipment has to stay where it is pretty much. All the PCs are XP Pro apart from one which is XP x64.

I'm not sure why you've set the subnet mask on the AP to be 255.255.0.0 - if you had the subnet mask for both set as 255.255.255.0, then all the machines would appear on the same subnet to each other. You should still be able to have both DHCP servers running in the ranges you specify if you need to.

If I put them both on the same subnet the Upstairs PC and Xbox 360 appear to bypass the Access Point's DHCP and get a 192.168.1.1xx address. Which would be perfectly fine if it kept working, but at some point for some reason they will stop drawing accepting DHCP requests. The router logs are showing it's sending out offers, but they aren't received. They must be being stopped at the AP somehow.

<fake edit> Hmm, after forcing a release/renew of the Upstairs PC and 360 they both did draw a 2xx address and opened upnp ports. Could it be the DHCP server in the AP simply took a few minutes to boot itself after the AP restarted? Bloody typical that is, it's all working fine now. Although I said that last time and a few hours later it borked again. </fake edit>

To be honest, the machines are going to put a shout out and the first DHCP server to respond is the one they'll take an address from. Can you specify which machines each DHCP server will hand out addresses to by MAC?

Doesn't seem like it. I can only permit/deny access to wireless on a MAC basis. To be honest I'd rather disable the upstairs DHCP entirely and let everything be handled by the router's DHCP, but after a while things start not getting an IP from it. I'm not sure why.

Have you tried adding more computers?

Sorry.

I could plug a wireless card into Upstairs PC 2 it you think it'd help

Have you considered a powerline backbone instead of the wireless one? It sounds to me like either the DHCP is getting lost over the wifi link, or it's timing out, or the upstairs router isn't passing through DHCP correctly. Could easily be down to shit firmware. You can get a pair of 85meg Powerline dongles for about £30 now, and it'd be a lot more reliable than that wireless link.

Nah. Apart from the fact I don't have any sockets to plug it in to with this amount of equipment, the wireless link itself is 100% stable. No packetloss whatsoever and connects to things like Grim...'s CS:S server with a ping in the low single digits even using the Upstairs PC. Xbox Live also handles really well and they are all over the wireless link. My setup was built to cater for my needs, and it does.