dman6666

A friend and I have connected our lans using some DLINK 900AP's and homebrew cantennas. Here's a link to a webpage we put up... Hope it's helpful to someone.

We used BNC and short lengths of ThinNet (Old 10baseT network cable) to connect the AP's to the cantennas. So far, it works fine, we get 11Mbps connects over the 400-600' distance. Perhaps we could do better with other cable/connectors but it works so we're happy.

Just an FYI: We connected our cantenna to the secondary connection internal to the AP. We soldered on a BNC fitting and connect the cable and antenna to that. However, before it will work: There appears to be a software/firmware type problem that requires that the intial connection be made using the factory antennae. Once that connection is established, the antennae can be disconnected and the cantennaes work fine.

I found a better workaround which is to use the linksys USB utility to disable the primary antennae port and use only the secondary antennae. I'd try the linksys firmware again, but, it locks up the AP after random amounts of inactivity.

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So, We have everything connected but I have a few questions.

1) I read that the Dlink 900AP / Linksys WAP11 can not do both AP Mode and Point to Multipoint simultaneously--which sucks because I'd like to connect my laptop to my AP too. I understand For that feature, we'd need to upgrade to the WET11 model. But, (here's the question): What is the difference between point to mulitpoint and AP mode from an authentication perspective?

In point to multipoint there appears to be no security... we just put the same SSID in on both ends and it connects. It seems, anyone with a 900AP could in theory plug in the SSID of our network and hopaboard. (I guess encryption would help here but) What prevents someone with an actual client from connecting using (faking) those settings? How does the AP know it's another AP and not a client? It does know, because the Laptop doesn't get ANY signal. I'd actually like to break into my OWN lan this way so I can use the laptop wirelessly even if it's not supported by Dlink. Otherwise, I'll end up buying another WAP nexttime I Find a good deal on one.

2) Anyone know (from experience hopefully) how many multipoints (900AP's) can we connect together? I heard "3", but, Is that the limit? If we'd like to get some other neighbors LANS connected, and run a not-for-profit WISP, this would be the way for us to go since it's so cheap.


3) Is there anyway to configure clients on our lan to default to the local Gateway for internet connection and to failover to the other LAN (via the WAPS) when one connection is down? How about using DHCP via a DLINK 704 Gateway? Manually Setting primary and secondary gateway's doesn't seem to work... but... maybe we are doing something wrong?

Thanks.