There are quite a few new wireless switches on the market. Most provide for centralized management of all the AP like upgrading firmware, load balancing etc. The move is in the direction of Thin-APs (less smarts, less expensive) with the switch being the brains. Some of them are using proprietory technology which means you will probably need to use their APs also to take full advanage of the switches capabilities. The Extreme switch (uses proprietory technology) There are others: It just depends on your budget.
I don't think it is all. Chantry supposedly works at L3. There's no real reason to have L2 work at all. It's just easier because the chips do the mac learning for you. I think L3 is really the way to go. Let the AP proxy arp for all the ip addresses used by the station. Then there's no possibility of arp poisoning attacks.
Ok. Google shows 53,000 hits for routeing and 15 million hits for routing. Routing wins.
First let me apologize. I could not divine your level of expertise from your two terse messages. Therefore, I assumed[1] that you were asking a beginners question and did not understand the difference between bridging and routeing, er.. routing. Obviously I misread the question. Sorry.
I've never considered the possibility of locking the MAC layer and doing eveything at the IP layer. I agree, it seems like a good idea. The FAQ covers the benifits:
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certainly would fix the roaming and portable IP problem as well as block various layer 2 attacks.
[1] Assumption, the mother of all screwups.
Layer 2 is bridging, not routeing. Layer 3 is routeing.
(Is it routeing or routing?)
A bridge has no concept of CIDR or netmask. Therefore, you can't just say "take all the traffic on this here network and shove it through a gateway over to yonder network". That's easy with a router. With bridging, each MAC address is unique with no guaranteed commonality with other machines on the same network. Therefore, to do routeing on Layer 2, you would need a route for every single last lousy MAC address on the network. That's not very practical or useful.
Also, with bridging, the manufactory assigns the MAC address (although it can be changed). With routeing, the network admin or the DHCP server assigns the IP address, giving much more control over organization, topology, and routeing on Layer 3.
Also, Layer 2 has no concept of services, such as http, ftp, telnet, etc. Layer 3 routeing allows you to control traffic by these services. Layer 2 only knows about ethernet and cannot distinguish the different types of traffic.
ALL (and I do mean all) wireless contraptions are Layer 2 bridges. A wireless bridge know nothing about Layer 3 (TCP/IP) features and functions. All it knows is ethernet and MAC addressing. If the destination MAC address is across the bridge, the traffic will pass over the bridge. If not, it won't pass. More simply, all 802.11 wireless does is encapsulate 802.3 ethernet packets, send them over a radio link, and reconstruct the original 802.3 ethernet packets at the destination end. Crudely, it's an extension cord for ethernet.
A wireless router is nothing more than a wireless bridge with an ethernet router glued onto one of the wireless (switch) ports. The function of the router is quite independent of the wireles bridge section.
I usually use dict.org. It's not just the spelling. I'm also having problems with the pronounciation. On the left coast, it's pronounced "rou-ter". In the UK, it's "roo-ter". In the south, it's "rou-tah". I've also heard "rah-ter" but I didn't ask where that came from.
It will probably not happen. I have a friend that scribbles computah books and others that do self-publishing. Both require substantial self-promotion, travel, book signing, investments, and time. After watching how it's done, I don't think I can do all that. I'm not very presentable, detest travelling, and am quite lazy. I know of one author that hired a stand-in to do all the hand shaking, book signing, and pose for the cover liner. However, that drastically reduced the book revenue. I do have some ideas for a book, but they have nothing to do with wireless, computahs, or the internet. Thanks for the interest.
Well, some people pronounce "root" with a vowel sound similar to that in "book". The pronunciation of "route" that rhymes with "out" instead of "boot" is a regional one that has, unfortunately, spread in the United States. To me, the word pronunced that way means a military disaster or, for the "er" form, a carpenter's tool. The standard American pronunciation used to be the one in the theme song from the 1960s television series: "Get your kicks / On Route 66."
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