Help with Home Wireless Networking Please!

Factual Questions
1

Hello all,

I’m trying to reconfigure my home network, and am having some difficulties. I had a relativly simple network before. A Westel dsl modem/router that also had wireless ability. For the most part, I didn’t change the default settings. I let it act as the DHCP server, and just used MAC address filtering for security. However I had the brilliant idea that since my mother in law lived relatively close, I could get a range expander, and possibly let her use my internet connection. As the Westel modem wasn’t very powerful, I went out and purchased a NetGear RangeMax router that I was told had much longer range. Unfortunatly, this one also seems to want to act as a DHCP server. Ok, I thought, no problem…I disable the wireless on the Westell, and let everything go through the NetGear router, as I only will be using wireless networking, so it shouldn’t be a big deal. At my mother in law’s house, I was barely able to pick up the single next to the window, so I bought a linksys range expander to pick up the singnal, and then re-transmit it upstairs to the computer. The problem seems to be that the range expander has to be a static IP address, and the Netgear router wants to assign a dynamic IP. I can see the linksys expander from the end computer, and the linksys router seems to be able to see the rest of my network, but I can’t get them all to talk right.

So, does anyone have any ideas about how I should configure all this? Or any other ideas about perhaps a better way of doing this? I’d rather take all this stuff back and try something else, if someone knows a better way of doing this. My mother in law’s place is about 250ft from my house, unfortunatly there are some buildings in between. Are there outside routers that I could mount higher up that would work better? I’m assming that you can’t just put anything outside, but there has to be something. Any other way of broadcasting a signal that would let her use my internet connection? I’m open to just about anything.

Thanks,

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2

On the Netgear router you have full control over the DHCP server so:

  • You can restrict the address pool so you can give a static address to the extender. Rather than, say, 192.168.1.2 – 192.168.1.254 you could make the range 192.168.1.20 – 192.168.1.254. Addresses below 192.168.1.20 will not be handed out and you can assign that address to another device as a static IP.

  • You can use address reservation where a device gets its address via DHCP but it will always get the same address from the DHCP server effectively acting like a static address.

  • You can turn off DHCP and manually configure each device on your network.

You also might consider turning off MAC address filtering till you get everything working right then turn that on (this will at least take one possible misconfiguration issue out of your way till it all works).

The range extender is usually an easy thing to setup nowadays. Generally sit it next to your wireless router, turn the extender on and press a button or two telling it to configure itself. When done move the extender where it needs to be and that should be that.

The extender has its own wireless security. Again I would turn all that off just to see things working then go back and start messing with the security aspects.

3

Ok, so if I turn off DHCP totally, and just use assigned IP’s for everything, that might solve one problem. Do I need to register the IP’s that I’m assigning with the router somehow? I didn’t see anything in the setup that would allow me to do that.