Repeater clients need direct access to router?

Perhaps the repeater isn't sending the correct DNS information. Are you able to ping the router outside the range of the router but within the range of the repeater?

Try assigning the DNS, Gateway along with the IP address.

I have a Dlink G router for the first 100' (non-line of sight) and a DLink G range extender for the second 100' (non-line of sight). Clients in the repeater's range get good signal and

54Mbps speed, but they cannot get their ip address unless they move to somewhere where they can see both the repeater AND the router.

Even if I use fixed ip addresses, they can't get to the net due to not being able to see the DNS or the default gateway (both are the router).

What am I missing? The repeater should provide access to the router for anyone in the repeater's range. It seems like a chicken and egg problem that shouldn't be there.

range of the repeater?

No, I forgot to say that I cannot ping the router 192.168.0.1 from the area where people are talking to the repeater. The repeater address is 192.168.0.30 and they can ping that no problem.

I did that, same result. Since they can't see the router directly, none of this works.

Maybe the repeater is not set up correctly? I did master resets on both to eliminate variables. Now both router and repeater have no security and 'default' for the ssid.

OK. But I would like to know if the repeater can see the router at the MAC level. Does the web interface to the repeater tell me if it can see the router by using the Site Survey?

Router: D-Link DI-524 Repeater: D-Link DWL-G710

I changed the SSID of the router and repeater back to 'default' during trouble- shooting. Why won't the SSID 'default' work?

1. Am I correct in assuming that the clients should not need to see the router directly, and access to the repeater is all they need to be able to get to the router?
2. How can I confirm that the repeater is seeing the router?
3. If the repeater is servicing clients at all, does that mean the repeater can see the router by definition? Or is it possible to see signal and data rates between the clients and the repeater even if the repeater cannot see the router?

I have two DWL-7100AP's here, one running as an AP and the other as a repeater. If the DWL-G710 is anything like the behavior of the DWL-7100AP in "Repeater Mode" then the following may be of some help.

Yep. Just do a site survery and pick your router's SSID. Set the same WEP encryption used by the intended router's SSID first, before picking the SSID though. Reason being that once it's "activated" as a repeater, you will no longer be able to get to it's web configuration over-the-air.

Assuming that the DWL-G710's behavior is similiar to the DWL-7100AP in repeater modes with both bands (7100AP has 802.11a and 802.11g) then it becomes transparant once activated. It won't be assigned an IP by the router, so there won't be any reference to it in the routers DHCP tables. It should be listed, by MAC address, on the router's status/connected clients page though. Clients going through the repeater will still be getting their DHCP from the router. Clients going through the repeater will also appear connected the router no different than if they were connected directly. (I.e., in the status/connected page of the router, you should see all connected clients -- repeated or connecting directly.) This may be a bad analogy, but perhaps think of the repeater as a "remote antenna". Its simply just passing garbage in and out.

You'll probably still want to give the DWL-G710 a static IP, within it's configuration, though. Doing so will allow you to re-configure it by plugging an ethernet cable directly into it from a desktop/laptop. All you have to do is manually temporarily configure the desktop/laptop ethernet port IP's (pick an IP within the same subnet as the repeater, use same subnet mask as repeater), fire up a web browser and point it towards the IP that was set within the G710's config. That'll be the only way you can communicate to the repeater once its up and running.

Anyway, thats the expected behavior at least for the DWL-7100APs -- with both bands repeating. If I just repeat one band (say, 802.11a) and use the other band (802.11g) as an ethernet/wireless bridge or even AP, I can still get to it over-the-air. Once both bands are repeatings, I have to connect an ethernet cable to get to it's config again. (Or reset it.)

It should be up and repeating easily by just:

1. Enter the WEP keys used by the intended repeated SSID on the router.
2. For your convience, pick an IP to use as a static IP and plug it into the repeater LAN config. This will be so that you can access the repeater again, with ethernet cable, without reseting it. To make sure there won't be any possibility of an IP collision, make sure the IP you pick isn't within the range of IP's that the router gives out.
3. Go to the repeater's wireless config page, do a site survery, and pick the SSID. It'll reboot and should be passing traffic.
4. Verify it's up and running. Depending on your client driver software, you may see two MAC addresses radiating the same SSID. Some drivers will only show the MAC address putting out the strongest signal of the same SSID, some show everything. My DLink driver shows all SSIDs, even if they are the same. The router should list the repeater's MAC address in the status/connected page. You won't see an IP for it in the DHCP table though. If you have a laptop or PDA, try roaming between the router and repeater. Once connected, it should seamlessly and automatically re-connect to the strongest signal. Look at the connected MAC address on the laptop/PDA and it should see it change automatically as you walk between the two. It may take a minute or so sometimes to change over, but you can also "bump it" by hitting re-connect.

Hope that helps some. The "transparant thing" also threw me off a little at first when I setup a repeater.

Cheers,

-Eric

Yes. That's literally the only way you can tell by looking at the various web pages. There's no signal strength, status, traffic information, or anything better than the site survey.

Thanks.

Because it's probably not the same SSID as that of the DI-524 router. Change the SSID in the DWL-G710 to be whatever the DI-524 is using, or just use the site survey thing to set it.

Correct. That's how a repeater should work.

1. Site survey button. That's fairly insipid but that's all the diagnostics the DWL-G710 seems to provide.
2. Ping the router or try to access the web setup in the DI-524 router.

Eric did a better job explaining how it should work than I could. Basically this thing works by the SSID. Nothing else seems to be necessary. Some repeaters insist on knowing the MAC addresses of the connecting router and client radios, but not the DWL-G710. It apparently works by simply setting the SSID and will repeat anything it hears with that SSID. I have some nasty things to say about this method of playing repeater, but I don't think it can be any simpler.

1. If you can see the DI-524 in the site survey.
2. and if everything has the same SSID.
3. and if you haven't done something weird like manually set the default gateway on the client radios, then it should work. More interesting is if you might have some chip incompatibilites between the wireless part of the DI-524 and the DWL-G710. It's 1am and I don't have time to lookup the chipsets. Tomorrow, maybe.

That's an accurate analogy. Using only the SSID for deciding if it should play repeater, the stupid box will repeat every single last lousy packet that it hears with the proper SSID. It probably has no way to determine if it has already heard a specific packet, so putting two of these in a small area on the same SSID should create havoc. I don't see anything that looks like a spanning tree protocol so loops are also possible. My guess(tm) is that only one of these can be used on a particular SSID in a given RF space.

Efficiency is my main complaint. Clients that can see both the repeater and the end point router will still have all their packets, and all their packets back from the repeater, un-necessarily repeated by the repeater. That's good for a 50% loss in delivered thruput. I can also imagine a few contrived situations where the repeater will constitute interference and thus an impediment to communications rather than an aid. If this thing had a way to limit repetition(?) of packets to only those clients that needed to use the repeater and some form of STP, I wouldn't complain (as much).

Thank you both, Eric and Jeff, for all the great information. Eric, I too had been making incorrect assumptions about the way the repeater should work. I will give these recommendations a try at the customer site on Monday!

It's good enough. In ham radio, we have an abomination called a "simplex repeater". It's usually located on a high mountain, with lots of coverage. It lies in wait, ready to ambush the unwary by repeating everything it hears on a channel. A users talks into their radio for anywhere between a few seconds to about 3 minutes. The repeater records what it hears. When the user releases their transmitter, the repeater repeats everything it heard again. It doesn't take long to make conversations tedious and drive everyone listening insane.

I think we have slightly different views of interference. I'm not talking about collisions. For high traffic situations, turning on CTS/RTS flow in the main router should reduce that to acceptable levels (slowing things down in the process). 802.11 is CSMA/CA (collision avoidance) where the various backoff timing mechanisms are sufficient to prevent excessive collision under most circumstances.

What I mean are un-necessary packets being transmitted that everyone else on the channel hears. If the repeater is on a rooftop on your system, you'll probably do just fine. However, if I'm next door on the same channel, all I hear are your repeated garbage from every one of your radios. In other words, your rooftop repeater has created interence to my system. If you were not using the rooftop repeater, then I probably would not hear your client radios.

Well, yes. The access point is fixed on a specific channel. The repeater and the client radios follow the access points selection of channel. Everything has to be on the same channel to work in a simplex system.

Now, I'm a big fan of full duplex systems, which require two radios, back to back. Each radio is on a different non-overlapping channel, thus allowing full duplex operation. No loss is thruput. In addition, you can use two different SSID's to control the traffic somewhat.

Not as much as you would expect. The FCC rules do not allow a transmitter to monopolize the channel 100% of the time and therefore has airtime limits. I forgot the exact rules but it's something like a 25% duty cycle. The backoff timing CSMA/CA rules also help prevent collisions.

You can see how well you're doing using ping, or as I prefer, fping.

the router through the repeater and watch the times. With no other traffic on the channel or through the router, the ping times should be identical for every ping. However, sometimes they're not. You'll get a much larger ping time than the majority. This is caused by lost packets, which are caused by collisions on an ideal system. However, they are also caused by other co-channel users and the usual microwave oven, cell phone, TV extension, etc trashmitters. Not a perfect test, but very useful.

Pinging 192.168.1.50 with 32 bytes of data every 1000 ms: Reply[1] from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=0 ms TTL=127 Reply[2] from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=10 ms TTL=127

192.168.1.50: request timed out Reply[4] from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=0 ms TTL=127 Reply[5] from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=0 ms TTL=127 Reply[6] from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=0 ms TTL=127 Reply[7] from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=10 ms TTL=127 Reply[8] from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=20 ms TTL=127 Reply[9] from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=10 ms TTL=127 Reply[10] from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=0 ms TTL=127 Reply[11] from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=0 ms TTL=127 Reply[12] from 192.168.1.50: bytes=32 time=10 ms TTL=127

Note the 10 msec responses when most of the time, it's zero. Those increased delays are mostly caused by a nearby system that's on the same channel. When I move it to a different channel, the packet loss goes away.

I have a similar scheme which should work for wireless. I download a very big file and watch the thruput using one of the traffic monitor programs. I tune the antenna and location for maximum thruput.

It would be the same if were farther away. Well, if the antennas were too close, you may run into overload and timing issues. There's a "dead zone" at around 3ft away where either the timing screws up at

54Mbits/sec or the receiver is overloaded (or both). I do most of my "ideal" testing at 6ft which doesn't have the problem.

Thanks. Didn't know if that would be a good analogy or not. :^)

I wondered the same thing about interference as well. When I set the SSID to be repeated with the DWL-7100AP, it automatically configures itself to broadcast on the same channel as the SSID being repeated. How much the two are colliding, I have no idea. I picked the location for the repeater by doing a quick improvised "site survery", basically just finding the location where the intended SSID's signal has dropped off to where it is just strong enough to keep the intended bit rate stable and placing the repeater there. Checked and compared the throuput from going through the repeater, going directly to initial SSID (with repeater still on), and going directly to initial SSID (with repeater off). Noted no difference in throuput, it looked great for all three. Out of curiosity, I may put the repeater close to the repeated AP and see what happens. You would think it would cause interference with each other?

Cheers,

-Eric

I am having problems w/this step. I am directly connected (wired) to the repeater to access its config pages. The repeater is 192.

168.0.30 and I set a static address on my laptop of 192.168.0.101 for the wired connection. I cannot access the repeater if I have both the wired connection and the client radio, or only the client radio, on at the same time.

So when it comes time to do the site survey on the repeater, I tried plugging the client radio into the laptop but of course it then loses connection to the repeater and cannot complete the survey.

What can I do to get around this problem?