I don't get good a wireless (wifi) signal everywhere in my house, so I wanted to put an unused router I had to use to provide a second wireless base to provide better coverage. I'm going to wire it into my home ethernet (wired) network, and also use it as a network switch so I can plug in several other wired ethernet devices into the reused router.
I have two TalkTalk routers: a D-link DSL-3780 and a Huawei HG533. I think both of these models are only sold to Talk Talk. I'm going to use the DSL-3780 as the second wireless base station. The technical term for using it in this way is a 'Wireless Access Point'
The description of how to do everything is here. There are some notes below:
Here's the plan of what I need to do to the access point (DSL-3780):
1. Turn off DHCP server
2. Set a fixed IP address
3. Change the wifi name and password to be the same as the main router's ones.
1. Turn off DHCP
Network routers and switches are very clever and dynamically assign addresses to everything that wants to connect to a network. DHCP is the protocol that controls this, and the DHCP server drives this process. Having a DHCP server on a network makes things nice and simple. Usually is is the router that does this. However we definitely don't want two DHCP servers interfering with each other, so we need to turn off the DHCP server in the access point.
2. Set a fixed IP address
With the DHCP server turned off, the access point needs to be able to connect to the network, so we need to assign a fixed ip address that the access point will always use. This contrasts with the dynamically allocated ip addresses that the other network connections will be given by the DHCP server in the router.
3. Set the WiFi name and password to be the same as the main router's ones
You would expect there to be some complicated way of configuring the router and the access point so that any wireless device can be passed to the strongest base station. But there isn't. If you set them to have the same WiFi name and password, then it all just works. Lovely.
I have two TalkTalk routers: a D-link DSL-3780 and a Huawei HG533. I think both of these models are only sold to Talk Talk. I'm going to use the DSL-3780 as the second wireless base station. The technical term for using it in this way is a 'Wireless Access Point'
The description of how to do everything is here. There are some notes below:
Here's the plan of what I need to do to the access point (DSL-3780):
1. Turn off DHCP server
2. Set a fixed IP address
3. Change the wifi name and password to be the same as the main router's ones.
1. Turn off DHCP
Network routers and switches are very clever and dynamically assign addresses to everything that wants to connect to a network. DHCP is the protocol that controls this, and the DHCP server drives this process. Having a DHCP server on a network makes things nice and simple. Usually is is the router that does this. However we definitely don't want two DHCP servers interfering with each other, so we need to turn off the DHCP server in the access point.
2. Set a fixed IP address
With the DHCP server turned off, the access point needs to be able to connect to the network, so we need to assign a fixed ip address that the access point will always use. This contrasts with the dynamically allocated ip addresses that the other network connections will be given by the DHCP server in the router.
3. Set the WiFi name and password to be the same as the main router's ones
You would expect there to be some complicated way of configuring the router and the access point so that any wireless device can be passed to the strongest base station. But there isn't. If you set them to have the same WiFi name and password, then it all just works. Lovely.
