We have three Linksys WAP54G and the documentation is just abysmal when it comes to figuring out how to set things up. We don't want anything fancy, we have three APs all with hard wired LAN connections that then go to a simple Linksys router. So why is it so hard to figure out from the web how to wire this up? Well, after an hour of searching, here are the answers for what the the four modes that a Linksys has actually mean which are:
- Access Point. This is the normal mode where you have a wired connection (usual several) and then a wifi connect. One of the connection usually goes to a separate router somewhere and then to the Internet. You can think of the WAP54G in this mode as a 4-port hub with a wifi hub connected to it that shares 54Mbps.
- AP Client. This mode is pretty useless in that what it means is that you bridge together two WAP54Gs, but the one that is the client can't have any PCs connect to it, only the hardwired PCs work You wold never need this mode for a normal office, so I'm not quite sure why it is the second thing there.
- Wireless Repeater. In this mode, one AP runs in normal AP mode, while the other is a wireless repeater, it just repeats everything it hears and thus you can extend your network. The big tradeoff is that it halves your bandwidth since half the bandwidth is used to the send and the other to recieve.
- Wireless Bridge. IN this mode you have you put the router on oned side and then set the a pair of WAP54G into bridge mode. It is also called "point-to-point" bridging which is a little clearer. This basically connects two wired Ethernets together
Tom's Hardware has the only decent tutorial. The Linksys manual is useless. Some other notes from this are that it requires that
We finally ended up just making them all just standard APs since we have Ethernet access wired for each. There is no use to have a wireless repeater bridge or whatever AP client mode is.
The big change we made was to change all the access point to use channels 1, 6 and 11, so we have minimum interference. Netstumbler is a good tool for doing this. Another issue is that someho we are still getting lots of port accesses from random sites through our router. Not cleR WHY THIS is happening as the Linksys BEFSX41 router doesn't seem to have any logging tools that are any good. My D-link had DMon but there is nothing for this from linksys.
