Advice wanted on connecting two houses over 802.11x

Hello.

I live next door to my parents. Our houses are actually about 30ft apart. My property is about six feet higher (terraced lots on the street) then theirs. While rebuilding my home my wife son and I lived in the extra wing of my parents house. So the space we were living in was say 70 feet from the closest wall of my house with 40 foot worth of home, a fence and a tree in between. Right before moving in I set up my DI-624 in the closet in my family room and was able to get my desktop to connect 70 feet away in the back wing of my parents house. It wasn't a great connection, but it did work.

My father's tivo sits on the closest wall to my house in his family room. It is not a straight line from his property to mine so the distance is prolly more like 45 feet. My router on the top shelf of a closet and his tivo is below his tv, so the height difference is prolly more like 12 feet. So, 45' with a 12 elevation change makes his tivo and my router 46.5' apart with two exterior walls and a fence and a tree between.

I want to give his tivo access to my broadband cable connection for doing its nightly call to the motherhsip for channel listings. I haven't had luck with the "approved" usb wifi adapters for tivo. I have had luck with the usb to cat5 adapters. So at this point it looks as if I am prolly going to have to go the route of getting some sort of router and modding it for the tivo.

Is the linksys wrt54... my best bet here? Is is going to play nice with my DI-624 or am I looking at needing to buy two new routers? I want to do this on the cheap as much as possible, but have recently started working weekends at best buy for christmas money and the employee discount so I can pick up my wireless equip there for about cost +10%.

Do folks on this group have suggestions? I know that D-link has less then a stellar name in some circles, but I have had quite good luck with them so far and don't really have a desire to switch out my router if I can get someone to help me with a solution that doesn't require it. As anecdotal evidence of the good luck that I have had with d-link, I have a server over 60' away from the router in my garage with my entire house in between, including my loadcenter, running a d-link pci card with stock antenna and that connection works just fine.

Any and all help/suggestions are quite appreciated. I am still in the planning phase of all this as I tried the approved out of the box solution and it didnt work. So I am busy doing my homework for my next foray into the mess.

Ryan

P.S. I appologize for the long post, but I felt it better to give all the details and a little background in order to get a good batch of answers.

Reply to
Ryan Case
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Believe it or not I forgot something.

I do have an older computah or two hanging around and am not scared of linux if that helps.

Ryan

Reply to
Ryan Case

Purchase another IP address from your ISP; usually it's just a few dollars per month. Put a switch (not a hub) between the modem and your router. Run a length of good quality Cat6 cable over to the other house to a router installed there. Now you have two MAC addresses, one on each router connected to the two authorized IP addresses. Each network is independent, but do share the total bandwidth available at the modem. Running an ethernet connection to the other house obviates any wireless transmission issues between houses.

Q
Reply to
Quaoar

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