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[Marty Chinn]

Ok, I'm trying to connect two LANs wirelessly. Currently one LAN has the router which also has wireless built in. There are two PCs hooked up to it. That's in the office. In the living room I want to have an Xbox, PS2, GC, Tivo, and maybe a HTPC hooked up to a switch which will then attach to a wireless device to connect to my wireless router in the office so it will be not only on the network but have access to the internet. Oh ya, to top it off, I want to have maybe one or two devices in the bedroom hooked up in a similar fashion. Do I need a wireless bridge adaptor or a wireless access point to link these two or three LANs together? What's the difference between them, and any suggestions on a brand/model to get?

 

[Marty Chinn]

Bump, nobody knows? Thought this would be a trivial answer....

 

[tenchir]

If you are trying to connect two wireless LANs, then it would depend on what wireless router you have. I have two 54g wireless Belkin routers that can also be cofigured as an Acess Point or bridge. I would just need to configured one of the router as a bridge and it would connect both LAN.

As for wifi routers without those functions, I wouldn't know how.

 

[Marty Chinn]

I've got a Linksys 4 port wireless 802.11b router right now which I was probably going to upgrade in the near future to 802.11g. I didn't realize I would need to configure the router in order for this to work.

Right now all the hardware I have is a switch box and this linksys router. I'd like to connect the two tonight somehow wirelessly. I was probably going to look at a netgear or linksys piece of hardware but didn't know which I should be looking at since I still can't figure out how a bridge and an access point differs. I guess for now, I just need to know which piece of hardware to hook up to the switch which will have the Xbox, Tivo, PS2, and GC hooked to it.

 

[tenchir]

http://www.practicallynetworked.com/networking/

Should help you on your problems.

Bridge
Bridges (sometimes called "Transparent bridges") work at OSI model Layer 2. This means they don't know anything about protocols, but just forward data depending on the destination address in the data packet. This address is not the IP address, but the MAC (Media Access Control) address that is unique to each network adapter card.

With a Bridge, all your computers are in the same network subnet, so you don't have to worry about not being able to communicate between computers or share an Internet connection. DHCP servers will work fine across Bridges, or if you assign your own IP addresses, you'll use the same first 3 "octets" of the IP address (Example: 192.168.0.X).

However, the only data that is allowed to cross the bridge is data that is being sent to a valid address on the other side of the bridge. No valid address, no data across the bridge. Bridges don't require programming. They learn the addresses of the computers connected to them by listening to the data flowing through them.

Bridges are very useful for joining networks made of different media types together into larger networks, and keeping network segments free of data that doesn't belong in a particular segment.

To make things easier on you, I recommend you should just buy a couple of new routers with bridge capabilities. You just need to set one router as a bridge to pick up the signal of the other router. I believe most new 54g routers have those function.