Yunar’s Online Venture

For the last three days after my day job ends, I immersed myself in configuring WDS on SMC wireless products. WDS is very usefull when you want to extend your wireless coverage using access point as a repeater.

I love to use SMC product because the coverage is awesome comparing to other brands I ever tried.
When you work in 3 floors office made from solid concrete, this will be excellent choice, just put the access point in 2nd floor and you will get good signal in every floor.

OK lets cut the crap and get into the steps of configuring succesful WDS, in this experiment I used 3 devices although I only used 2 of them eventually :

SMCWBR14-G
A wireless broadband router

SMCWEBT-G
A wireless access point/bridge

SMC7904WBRA
A wireless broadband router + ADSL modem in one box

• First thing you need to know that this WDS feature is not so standard, avoid using wireless device from different manufacturer.

• Assign a static IP address to each AP, don’t configure it as a DHCP client.
• Set all APs to the same (clear) channel, observe the neighbouring wireless networks channel using site survey utility, avoid using the same channel, the best choice is 1,6, or 11.
• Set each AP to a different SSID, in most forum you will told to set the same SSID, don’t do this.
• Gather the MAC addresses of each AP and registered it in the WDS section, don’t put AP own’s mac address.
• Activated DHCP server in the wireless router (SMCWBR14-G or SMC7904WBRA), don’t activated DHCP server in other side of your wireless device.
• Try to connect to the internet using your notebook, make sure you got an IP from DHCP server via repeater (AP in repeater mode).

If you can not find other SSID in the WDS menu by pressing rescan button in SMC7904WBRA , make sure your mode is in 802.11b/802.11g.
You can email me when need the latest firmware for SMC7904WBRA (ver 0.47) .

notice:
This posting contrary with my previous post as my knowledge increase “access point didnt work in repeater mode” , please ignore that posting, and follow this newer posting.

I Can not access ROMMON using ctrl-break ?
Sometimes I cannot access ROMMON using Break or Ctrl-Break keys, later I find out that I must use Break- right Ctrl keys instead of left Break-left Ctrl.

Cannot copy IOS image file from router to TFTP server ?
I once cannot copy IOS image files from router’s flash memory to TFTP server. Although I tried with many ways. I found that I wrongly read l and 1, thats very silly but the letter and the figure are very similar. The file name and directory are something like this: c3550-i5q3l2-mz.121-13.EA1a/c3550-i5q3l2-mz.121-13.EA1a.bin

Cannot connect to router’s console at all.
Sometimes we saw garbage character in the router’s console, we must adjust serial’s baud rate to 19200 (normally 9600) to be able to login to console.
But when you can not see garbage character at all, try to open the case and examine whether the ribbon cable properly connected or not.

As I promised before, here are my options trading result :
Baidu com inc + 2.2%
Hewlett Packard corp + 3.7%
KLA-Tencor Corp + 5.1%
The total percentage is + 11.1 %
Note that this percentage are coming from my whole account value.
Waiting for June-Jul trading result with better percentage