The time has come for me to buy some more access points. I'd like them to work like my current ancient Proxim Harmony ones. The desirable features for me that these have are:
(a) The access point's IP address, the wired machines' IP addresses, and the wireless machines' IP addresses can all be in the same class C IP subnet (and indeed are in my setup)
(b) MAC addresses are preserved over the bridge
(c) Broadcasts make it over the bridge
(d) There can be multiple machines on each side of the bridge
So, for example, the same DHCP server on the wired network segment can assign DHCP addresses to both wired and wireless clients based on their MAC. The access point simply passes the traffic, it doesn't run any servers or do any NAT or whatever itself. (I suspect that our current ones must maintain ARP tables so that not all unicast traffic everywhere is repeated on the other segment. Apart from for their own configuration, I don't think they're IP-aware at all, they probably just look at MACs.)
I don't mind if I can't get encryption working or if I have to assign the access points' IP addresses statically. (My current ones get theirs over DHCP, but that's just a nice-to-have.)
This isn't too much to ask, is it? I'm puzzled because I can't find a cheap option where it's obvious in advance that it will work. I am happy to go the route of doing something like buying a Linksys WRT54G and installing HyperWRT, DD-WRT, OpenWRT, or whatever on it, if that's what it'll take to keep things cheap. Can anyone confirm that something-or-other offers something that satisfies the above, that my existing years-old no-longer-sold access points can already do?
The options I've found so far seem to get upset if you have more than one machine on both sides of the bridge, or they want to have the repeated packets sent with the MAC of the bridge, or they get upset if everything tries to live in the same IP subnet or whatever. I wonder if one of the third-party WRT firmware options that does proxy ARP might be good enough? I'd prefer to have some confirmation in advance that it will work, though, before risking turning an access point into a brick in reflashing it. (-: (Or, if anyone knows a cheap access point that will work as an actually-transparent bridge instead of being loaded with fancy NAT/DHCP/whatever features, that'd be great too. All our NICs are a/b/g so any type will do.)
-- Mark