Radio Bantik:
Days in the Life of an Alpha Geek

(I won’t comment on the fact that it’s been over nine months since I’ve posted.)

Our new house is significantly larger than the old one, and has thick plaster walls full of iron pipes and who knows what else. This was causing a lot of problems for my poor old NetGear wireless router, so we upgraded to a flashier 802.11g router with multiple antennas.

I was disappointed that there was still a dead spot in the living room; my laptop’s connection from the couch was terrible, and the old TiBook permanently hooked in to the television couldn’t see the network at all. So on Saturday I drilled a hole in the floor and ran cable down to a room in the first floor, with the idea of attaching the old wireless router and using it to extend the strength of the network.

I’m only posting this because it took hours to get this right, and I want to save other people some time.

The most important points are:

• Consider the wireless router that’s connected to your cable modem / DSL your main router
• The additional router(s) are repeaters
• Unless you have something like the AirPort Express, your repeater routers have to be physically connected to your main router.
• The repeater routers do not have an uplink; they must be connected to the main router via one of their hub/local ports, not their uplink port.
• Only the main router should serve as a DHCP server. The other(s) should have DHCP disabled.
• The repeater routers must each broadcast on a unique channel.
• In the configuration of each repeater router, make sure that the name of your wireless network is the same. The WEP keys should be the same as well. This way, client machines will be able to move seamlessly from base station to base station.

I’m still having a little bit of trouble consistently seeing the network from the television laptop; MacStumbler shows signal-to-noise as 72:53, regardless of what channel I select for the repeater router. If I figure it out, I’ll update this with my findings.