Wireless internet and home networking question.

[SurfD]

I live in a large house with a bunch of college folk, and I am the guy who "supplies" the internet for most of the residents who want it.
Part of my problem is that I live in the basement, and a number of people live on the second floor, and running wires from my router to their rooms is damn near impossible.
Recently a new guy moved in who brought his own wireless router with him, so I got to thinking:

Would it be possible to set up his wireless router to pull a signal off of my wireless router, such that he could act as the hub for the people on the second floor, without me needing to run a wire up there?

IE:

Cable Modem --> My router (Wireless connection)--> His Router (Wired Connection)--> His computer, other computers up stairs

Is this possible?  Or is that kind of thing done with different hardware?

[Engels]

Its perfectly possible.

His computer's gateway = his router

his router's gateway = your router

your router's gateway = your cable modem

There's also such a thing as a signal booster too.

[Viin]

I don't care much for router to router setups, why can't he just use your wireless connection? He shouldn't need to feed the second floor himself.

If you get a "good" wireless router, it should be fine in a multistory house as long as it's not concrete walls or anything. Align the antenna horizontally so it gets the best coverage up and down. (So get a router that has an adjust able antenna).

[Trippy]

If both routers can talk to each other in "wireless repeater" mode it should be doable, otherwise it gets more complicated since the traditional way of adding an additional access point to a network requires cabling the access point using Ethernet. There are also "range expanders" (essentially a wireless repeater) such as this one that will do what you want -- extend the range of your router without requiring any additional network cabling.

[Righ]

Wireless Distribution System.

[SurfD]

Well, the main reason he cant use my Wireless Router directly, is because he doesent have a Wireless Network Card in his PC.  His setup (before he moved here) was exactly the same as mine:  Cable modem -> Router -> PC, all wired.  Only reason I have a wireless router is because my sister has a Laptop, which she brings over occasionally and connects wirelessly.

If i could connect wired conveniently from my router to his, i would love to, but this house is not exactly modern, and was not wired for any kind of internal network.  Fishing cables through the walls / wherever is a bit beyond anything i am willing to go through to get a wire up to the second floor.

[Ironwood]

such as this one

DO NOT BUY THAT.  DO NOT.

[Sky]

It's simple with Airport. You can chain routers or even grab the little plug dealie (Airport Express, iirc) that just plugs into the wall and acts as a wireless repeater.

I think you need a mac to admin it, but you should have one anyway :P Works fine with any hardware, of course.

[Morfiend]

such as this one

DO NOT BUY THAT.  DO NOT.

Why?

[Ironwood]

I bought one for the bosses house.  It's Rubbish, it has bad range, doesn't support many other devices that aren't linksys, it can't handle security, so you have to run an open wep, it's basically complete, complete, complete shite.

[Righ]

Just use a Linksys WRT54G - they do WDS natively now. But if you use the Sveasoft firmware you can also turn up the strength of the radio transmitter too.

[Viin]

I just bought a Netgear Wireless Router, because it was $35 at BestBuy and my wife needed to get online with her wireless capable laptop.

Seems fine with my wired connection, but her laptop has issues. Every 3 mins or so it'd lose the DHCP issued IP and, even though it never says it's disconnected from the wireless network, it get's an "automatic private ip" and loses all the gateway/dns settings. Rebooting the laptop gets it back online, but then it promptly loses it again. It's never been used on a wireless network before, so I don't know if it's the router or the laptop (leaning towards laptop); I'll have to do some troubleshooting and see what happens. I'll bring my iBook home and see if I can get online with that without any problems.

So anyways, it seems to work fine and it supports WPA-PSK which seems to work OK. And it's cheap.

[SurfD]

Just use a Linksys WRT54G - they do WDS natively now. But if you use the Sveasoft firmware you can also turn up the strength of the radio transmitter too.

Coincidently enough, I have a WRT54g (ver 2).  The new roomie has something by some company i have never heard of.  Do you think they will play well together, or am i going to have problems?  Also, where can I grab this Sveasoft Firmware you speak of, and is it easy to recover if i screw up the installation?

[Righ]

You should be able to get them to play well together. I recommend that you get the Sveasoft firmware from here:

http://wrt54g.thermoman.de/

Sveasoft have long been playing a game of using open source code in a very dodgy way. So don't go buying free software from them. There are apparently also alternatives that allow similar tweaking now:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MoreOnAlternateLinksysFirmware.aspx