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setting up 2 (wireless) links to other location

 
Mischa Uppelschoten
New Member

setting up 2 (wireless) links to other location

I am pretty new to this topic, so I'll try to explain the best I can.

We have recently started renting an additional building and the only possible connection to it is wireless. For increased speed and flexibility I have setup 2 separate channels with 4 wireless bridges in total. Old building A has a 4000M/J4121A (C.09.28) and a 4204vl/J8770A (L.10.12) with approx 20 office workers. New building B has a 2512/J4812A (F.05.55) with 2 office workers and a storage server.

The wireless links work fine and if I test them separately, I get a very steady throughput of 13MB/s.

Is it possible to:
1. Combine my two wireless links to create one 26MB/s link? If yes, which technology? (Trunking?)
2. If no, can I then somehow associate ports in my remote location B for a "manual" load balancing? If yes, (again), which technology? VLAN? Subnet? Spanning Tree?

Thanks much!
Mischa.
3 REPLIES 3
Matt79
Advisor

Re: setting up 2 (wireless) links to other location

Hi Mischa,

I have to admit that I don't understand how your wireless bridges are working (I've never needed to configure one). But from what I've understood of your query the links are each working separately - ie. WAP 1 in Office A bridges with WAP 1 in Office B, and WAP 2 in Office A bridges with WAP 2 in Office B. If I've misunderstood that please set me straight.

And then, are you setting clients in Office B with a gateway of either WAP 1 or WAP 2 to take advantage of either Bridge 1 or Bridge 2 ?

I'm sure it is not possible to combine two or more wireless bridges, but I am sure it is possible to manually load balance them as you suggest.

Could you give me all the IP Addresses involved and the locations of all network devices that need to be accessible from each office, eg. Servers, Printers, Firewall etc.

I'm sure I'll be able to help, just need a little more info on exactly how your wireless bridges operate and which devices need to communicate with which others etc.

Many thanks,
Matt
Mischa Uppelschoten
New Member

Re: setting up 2 (wireless) links to other location

Thanks Matt! I have to admit that this is a bit moot right now because I solved it, albeit not the way I was hoping to.
To reply to your post:
1. Your understanding from the first paragraph is correct.
2. The bridges are a level 2 device, so they don't route traffic at all and they are completely "transparent" to traffic. All the clients in either office have the same gateway set. The bridges have a management IP address, but that's it.

What I ended up doing is simply attach a hub to one of my two bridges in the B office and then not attach that hub to anything but clients. This basically creates a "U" shape in my network, preventing any loopbacks or routing issues. All clients are on the same segment, no VLAN's necessary and I can manually "load balance" things. Trunking never worked right in that it would never utilize both connections.

Thanks again for your response.
Mischa.

Matt79
Advisor

Re: setting up 2 (wireless) links to other location

Fair enough - glad you got a workable solution :)