Turn router into WAP

Hello all,

I am having a bit of a problem here. I have a wired network already setup, but would like a way for wireless users to connect to it. I have come across a Netgear wireless router that I would like to use for this.

Now I figured it should be pretty simple. But I am a bit confused. In the router settings there are two options for ip addresses and subnet masks. The first is the Internet IP which lets me enter an IP, subnet mask, gateway, and DNS settings. I set the IP to an unused address and then entered in the subnet mask, gateway, and DNS ip address for those respective servers.

Now there is another option for LAN IP settings. The default IP for this is 192.168.1.1 Now I wanted to change this to match the IP convention used on our network. So I tried changing it to the address I used for the Internet IP setting (I'm not really sure what the difference is between these two).

So I think I'm all set. Then, I plug the router into our network and try connecting via a wireless laptop. I am able to connect to the router and have an IP address assigned from it (I left the router as a DHCP server because we don't have one, all our addresses for wired clients are assigned manually so I figured this would be the easiest way to deal with wireless clients).

Now I can connect to the network wirelessly and I get an IP assigned from the router. I can get on the internet as well and browser to other computers on the network.

The problem is that I cannot reconnect to the router. When I enter in its new IP address in my browser, I can't get to the setup page. I also cannot ping the router.

I tried running a tracert to a random website and it shows that I am indeed going through the router first.

So, what gives? Why can I not get back on to the router?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Reply to
ihatecrappymail
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On 20 Jul 2006 10:00:34 -0700, " snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com" wrote in :

See How To below on using a wireless router as an access point.

Reply to
John Navas

| The problem is that I cannot reconnect to the router. When I enter in | its new IP address in my browser, I can't get to the setup page. I also | cannot ping the router. | | I tried running a tracert to a random website and it shows that I am | indeed going through the router first.

And you are connecting to the same IP address as the trace shows?

I wouldn't put it past the manufacturer to have shut off ability to administer wirelessly this way.

It might help (especially if that's where the problem happened) if you show us all the settings. Every IP, every netmask, route table entries if you put any in, gateway settings, on every node and every machine. There are so many ways to make things go wrong you could make a whole wiki documentaing them all (and very boring). Best to just let someone see if everything is right and well planned.

Reply to
phil-news-nospam

Thanks for the replies. After some more experimenting it seems that I can change the routers IP to anything that is in the 192.168.1.1 -

192.168.1.254 range and still be able to connect to it. I want it to be 10.1.1.1 though and when I change it to that, that is when I can no longer connect to the router. Thoughts?

Thanks

snipped-for-privacy@ipal.net wrote:

Reply to
ihatecrappymail

On 20 Jul 2006 15:29:43 -0700, " snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com" wrote in :

The device trying to connect to the router needs to be on the same subnet in terms of IP address and subnet mask. For a router at

10.1.1.1, you could manually configure the computer to (say) IP 10.1.1.100 and subnet mask 255.0.0.0
Reply to
John Navas

Yes, I know that. Both the router and the computer trying to connect are on the same subnet (255.255.255.0). I left the router as a dhcp server and told it to use the ranges of 10.1.1.2-10.1.1.20.

Any other ideas?

John Navas wrote:

Reply to
ihatecrappymail

On 20 Jul 2006 10:00:34 -0700, " snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com" wrote in :

Let's call that the WAN port, used only when routing. It's irrelevant to an access point. Since you don't have anything connected to it (right?!), the settings are largely irrelevant (as long as the router doesn't barf on them).

That's likely to make the router barf (even though it shouldn't be connected to anything in access point use). The firmware mostly likely expects the WAN to be a different address range from the LAN, with both its own WAN port and the WAN gateway in the WAN subnet range.

As long as there are no conflicts. Make sure the DHCP server is configured so that won't happen.

I thought you were using it as an access point (a bridge), not a router. Traceroute won't see a bridge, only a router. Is the WAN port disconnected? Did you read the How To reference I posted previously?

Reply to
John Navas

| Yes, I know that. Both the router and the computer trying to connect | are on the same subnet (255.255.255.0). I left the router as a dhcp | server and told it to use the ranges of 10.1.1.2-10.1.1.20.

Just "255.255.255.0" alone does not define a subnet. If the router is on 10.1.1.1 then the computer connecting to it needs to be on one of the IPs between 10.1.1.2 and 10.1.1.254 for them to find each other's MAC address. The 255.255.255.0 is effectively just a statement of the size of the subnet expressed in terms of the bit masked used to isolate the network part of the whole address, converted to dotted decimal.

I do stuff like this in Linux by giving my ethernet interfaces many different IP addresses so they can reach a variety of different subnet numbers I play around with in many ranges.

Reply to
phil-news-nospam

Run IPCONFIG /ALL to verify how the computer is getting configured, and post the results here.

p.s. Out of curiosity, why are you insisting on using a different netblock?

p.p.s. Please don't switch posting styles (top vs bottom) in mid-thread

-- it's confusing, and considered a bit rude. Thanks.

On 20 Jul 2006 16:15:36 -0700, " snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com" wrote in :

Reply to
John Navas

This is all true, but the OP left DHCP on, so the computer would have broadcast a request for an address, and got given one inthe same subnet as the router.

Reply to
Mark McIntyre

On Fri, 21 Jul 2006 18:00:05 +0100, Mark McIntyre wrote in :

If and only if the router is configured properly, which might well not be true, and which is why I asked for the IPCONFIG /ALL

Reply to
John Navas

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