Cisco Aironet 1200, how do I intelligently expand my coverage using 2 access points

May 24, 2006 5 Replies
N

Hi,



My office currently has 1 cisco 1200 accesspoint for all wireless traffic.


- It uses a local MAC list to restrict access



- It uses 128bit WEP encryption



- it has a highgain antena



This Access point currently functions completely independent of any other network components.



Now I bought a second one, it's twin. In plain english: I want these two access points to act as one. I want one at each end of the Building, giving us more complete coverage using a single MAC access-list, one SSID, and one WEP key.



Now I need some help on configuring these 2 APs. I started by playing with WDS. I'm not even sure if that is the correct acronym to be fooling around with given my objective.



Any advice on what I should configure first would be greatly appreciated.


- Martin



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C

WDS will kind of do what you want, but there are better ways -- I'm not sure what they are with specific Cisco equipment, though. Using non-Cisco stuff I just gave two APs the same SSID and the same WEP key and they integrated flawlessly.

Chris

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M

If the AP's are going to be on the same subnet then you can use simple layer 2 roaming - use same SSID, same WEP key and same MAC address filter.

Make sure the the channel set for each AP are 5 channels apart.

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B

you could just copy the exact config file, change the hostname and channel and be all set.

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N

Ok, this is workable.

I have like 40+ MAC addresses already in the first AP, so copying those was way more work than I wanted. Copying the config is so obvious that it never occurred to me.

So if I ....

- copy the config

- change the hostname and the ethernet IP address

- switch to a different channel

Then The only added problem is that new laptops need to have their MAC entered into 2 different devices. I can live with that. If I ever suspect that the are out of sync I can alwasy copy one config to the other.

Thanks for the input, I now know what I going to try.

- martin

BG wrote:

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M

was way more work than I wanted.

Copying the MAC address filter using CLI should have been very easy or were you using some sort of GUI? If so strongly suggest learning the CLI...

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