extending a HostAP networks range

[John Roark]

 >John Roark schrieb:
 >> Besides the obvious solution of increasing the wattage and using a
 >> larger antenae... how would I extend the range of my wireless network.
 >> Is there a way to link HostAps so that where one ap's range ends 
another
 >> starts and extends the range by 50%? Some kind of dumb forwarder that
 >> simply repeats whatever it picks up (without NAT)? I want it to look
 >> like the client is talking directly to the main hostap, when in fact it
 >> is talking to another box that is merely extending the range of the
 >> hostap... is this possible?
 >>
 >> eth0 : AP-A : wlan0 -- <wireless network> -- wlan0 : "Extender"
 >>                                                |
 >>                                   <extended wireless network>
 >>                                                |
 >>                                              wlan0 : Client
 >>
 >> Is this a repeater? a bridge? does RDS do this (what is RDS?)? I 
want it
 >> all to be on the same network (192.168.1.0/24)... and I need it to
 >> preserve MACs and IPs.
 >>
 >
 >I think what you are looking for is a feature called WDS as far as I
 >see. See hostap docs for details. I think what you are looking for is
 >a WDS-Link between AP-A and wlan0. Only problem is, that afaik WDS only
 >works between two hostap-boxes.
 >
 >Greets
 >Martin
 >

Thanks for a quick reply,
I looked at the HostAP docs... and read the example they used for WDS. 
In my situation would I then want to do something like this? If I had 
the following:

AP-A has wlan0 with MAC 00:11:11:11:11:11 IP: 192.168.1.1
(AP-A also has eth0 that I will do NAT from the wireless over)
AP-B (the extender) has wlan0 with MAC 00:22:22:22:22:22 IP: 192.168.1.2
(AP-B has only wlan0 no other eth devs)

to set them in wds and extend AP-As range I would do the following:

AP-A config:
------------
iwpriv wlan0 wds_add 00:22:22:22:22:22
brctl addbr br0
#brctl addif br0 eth0 # don't bridge with eth0 because I will use NAT
brctl addif wlan0
brctl addif wlan0wds0
#ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 # also because eth0 is not part of the bridge dev
ifconfig wlan0 0.0.0.0
ifconfig wlan0wds0 0.0.0.0
ifconfig br0 192.168.1.1 up

AP-B (extender) config:
-----------------------
iwpriv wlan0 wds_add 00:11:11:11:11:11
# do I need to do any bridging here?
# or bring up wlan0wds0 or is that linked to AP-A's wlan0wds0?

This will not mangle the ethernet/IP packets (i.e. it will not change 
the mac or ip in the eth/ip headers... right?). I hope that makes some 
sense...

Thanks,
John

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