Stupid questions

Dustin Marquess jailbird at alcatraz.fdf.net
Fri Sep 5 20:19:01 EDT 2003


Okay, I have two questions that I should already know the answer to,
since they're pretty stupid.  But it's Friday and I haven't had enough
caffiene, so I'm going to use that as an excuse.

Right now I have a pretty generic setup.  I have one main router (800Mhz
Duron running Linux) that has 2 100MB NIC cards and 1 802.11b card
running HostAP.  One NIC is handing the external connection (via
cablemodem), the other is handling my internal LAN, and the 802.11b card
is serving our laptops.  All of this is pure routing, no bridging.

I plan on moving my servers and my route+cablemodem to another part of
the apartment.  The problem is the laptops and two of my workstations
are staying where they are.

I was thinking of something like:

<-ext.net.->router<-wireless(bridged)->repeater<-wireless(routed)->laptops
              ^                           ^
              |                           |
    internal LAN (servers)      internal LAN (workstations)
(the router is running NAT)

The few questions are:

1) Am I completely nuts to do this? (I know I'm already nuts, but still!
:) ).
2) Does the bridging make sense?  Maybe IP unnumbered routing, if Linux
even supports that...
3) Does the repeater machine need two 802.11b cards, or will the laptops
and the WDS link share the same card?
4) I know WEP will reduce the bandwidth somewhat.  Will enabing
host-based encryption/decryption help with this?

-Dustin




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