Wireless LAN access, how to set up?
 

Hello all,

My goal is to access my LAN wirelessly. By access my LAN, I mean I wish to be able to mount NFS shares, have ssh access to the various boxes, etc etc. I wish for it to be just like a wired connection, but you know, wireless.

It seems to me there are a few ways of accomplishing this, but I am having large amounts of trouble getting it up and running.

1.
I currently have a Dlink DI-524 wireless router which I simply plugged into my switch. This works fine for simple wireless internet connectivity, but because the device insists on NATing the connection, I do not have access to the LAN. I have tried setting up this device statically, but I cannot get it to work. This may be because of my lack of networking skills. I guess my question is can you even accomplish what I want with one of these dlink appliances? How do you set it up so it doesn't NAT?

2.
I am also setting up my old G4 to be my new dedicated router. So I was thinking of dropping a wireless PCI card in it. Of course this brings up huge problems on its own on x86 let alone PPC. I have found an MSI card that works on Linux, but the driver will not work on big endian machines (ie: PPC). Am I naive in thinking that the native wireless drivers (PrismII, Atmel, or Hermes) should work even for a pci card in a PPC machine? If so where the hell do you find one of these cards? I have been searching for a suitable card for a _long_ time now, and I am getting extremely frustrated because the manufacturers never include chipset info. How do you locate one of these cards? Please don't suggest a card that requires ndiswrapper because that will not work on PPC either...

So, obviously I would prefer to get the dlink working so I don't have to buy new hardware. So can anyone give me some insight here? I can give lots more info on request, if it will help to shed some light on my situation here.

Thanks

1) I'm not familiar with that router, but with my Linksys wireless router I had to give it a static IP, point the gateway to my "real" router and then turn off the DHCP server on the wireless router. After that it pretty much behaves as nothing more than a wireless access point.

2) I guess that I'm with you on this.....A card with native Linux wireless drivers should work for this. And since this project proves that you are obviously up for a challenge, you could investigate using the native linux broadcom drivers. I'm pretty sure that a lot of AirPort cards use Broadcom chipsets and there is a fair amount of chatter on how these cards work (or don't) with the native Linux driver. The downside is that the driver is very much alpha level software with daily changes. However, I grabbed an early January version and it has been working pretty well. As far as I can tell, WPA may still be unsupported, but WEP works fine.

See, I could swear I did this. I set it up with a static address that fits in with my current network, but when I try to connect I get nothing. I can ping the router, but not any boxes on the LAN, and not the internet, but when I use dhcp on the router, it works just fine for internet connectivity. Perhaps my router just doesn't have this functionality?

I suppose that is always a possibility, but I can't imagine why Dlink would build a router that absolutely MUST act as a router. Then again, lots of things don't make sense to me.

I'm assuming from your description that you have another router between your wireless router and the internet. If that is true, can you ping the wireless router from the router in front of it?

Also, just for giggles, I'd really double check all the settings on your wireless router. I know on mine, just setting a static IP address didn't do the trick. It also turns out that I had to set not one, but two static IP address. There is a place to set the WAN IP address and a place to set the LAN IP address. On my router, both of those had to be the same. And if your wireless router is insisting on NATing I'd look for an option to turn that off. On my router there is an Adminstration page that for some unknown reason is completely separate from the Setup page and controls more advanced functions such as NAT and routing. Is it possible you have some of this stuff buried in your routers software?

Yes, this is true. I cannot ping the router though...

My network is like this:

<internet>---<cablemodem>---<linux NAT/firewall box>---<linksys 8 port switch>----<dlink wireless router>

I have a static IP from my ISP, which is configured on the Linux NAT box. The second nic is configured with 192.168.0.10. The LAN clients are in the 192.168.0.100-106 range. The dlink is set up statically as 192.168.0.1, and uses 192.168.0.10 as the gateway.

Yup. These are both the same.

Strange that boxes on the LAN cannot see the dlink? Also, I cannot connect wirelessly anymore in this static configuration, only when I use a cable...and even then I cannot access the internet anymore. This thing seems totally broken.

Honestly, I'm stumped. From what you've described it should be working. About the only thing I can think of is to drop the DLink service people an email and see if they have any clues. However, if you're losing function on the router it could be the hardware is going bad. I know when I lost wireless router to a lightning strike it behaved pretty oddly for a few days before the wireless died. The wired connections worked fine however, and still do.