wireless bridge help

[chris_244]

I have a wireless network in my house. I have a SMC wireless router connected to my cable modem and 2 machines hard wired to it (I know drawings work better but I can???t do that right now). They work fine and everything is fine there. I also have two laptops with 802.11b cards. Also work fine and when connected to this router they are all in the same workgroup and I can share files, the internet, etc.. (works great). Here is the question??? I do not get great converge in the house and therefore I have another wireless router (Linksys) connected via a separate bridge (WET11, don???t know if my AP has the AP/Bridge feature and I obviously didn???t know this when I bought the bridge, it is a BEFW11S4 would love if you could let me know if I got screwed on buying a separate bridge but that not why I am writing). There is only one bridge, it communicates with my SMC wireless router I don't know why or how but I do not have two bridges! So I have the second AP connected via the bridge in another part of the house and when I take one of the laptops into that area I do a release and renew, lock onto the other AP and I have internet access. The second AP get assigned a IP address from the Bridge/firstAP and my laptop gets one from the second AP. I am able to share the internet connection without a problem however my other networking capabilities do not work. For example I can no longer see the other machines in my WORKGROUP, hence I cannot share files. Sometimes I can share one way and see a machine on one computer but not the other. I have XP running on one machine and 2000 on the rest. I would appreciate any assistance you could provide, I would love to get this problem solved. The bridge should simply act as just that ???a bridge??? correct, so that it would appear as though I was in the same LAN segment? This does not seem to be working seamlessly.



Chris Turillo

[Nigel Stevens]

Im no expert but in looking into this for myself I believe there to be issues with the fact that you are obtaining a new ip address from the bridge and that may not be in the same range as the ininial one and the range your workgroup is on are you able to specify the range in which the bridge specifies its ip adresses if so this could solve the problem

[Ron Kinner]

Link your PC to your SMC and do:

ipconfig /all

Now link your PC to the Linksys and repeat.

post the two results.

I suspect it's like Nigel says that you have a different IP network on the Linksys.

IF that is the case then the problem is that the Linksys is blocking the broadcasts from Windows that set up the network neighborhood. You have a few alternatives:

The easiest would be to get the Linksys to forward the broadcasts. This would be a piece of cake on a Cisco but I don't really speak Linksys so all I can tell you is look at the advanced feature called Port Forwarding and see if that will do it. Think it's port 135-139 that you need tho you might try telling it to forward the DHCP port and maybe you could get just one server doing DHCP instead of both.

Another surer way to do it would be to put entries in your laptop's LMHOST file for every one of the PCs that don't move around. (Or you could make one of them into a WINS server and just put its address in the LMHOSTS file. Make sure the WINS server has a static address.)

The best way would be to assign static addresses to every PC and router and put the info in the LMHOSTS then at least you would know where they were and could just map the network drives and not worry about them. You might have to change the default route when you change rooms but that's fairly simple to do and you can use a bat file to do it.

Ron

Ron