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Forcing it to hit my repeater


phunni
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I have a wireless router that, because of where my cable internet comes into the house, is located in a small outhouse/study next to the house. This has meant that that there are several bits on the far side of the house from the router that don't get reasonable signal.

 

I bought a wireless repeater in the hopes of solving that problem and assumed that my cards would automatically try and connect to the strongest signal - but this doesn't seem to be the case. They seem to try and connect to the router at least as often as they connect to the repeater.

 

What I really want to do is try and find a way to force all my wireless cards to connect to the repeater rather than the router - which will only have a direct wireless connection with the repeater.

 

I do have MAC address filtering on both and wondered whether only allowing the repeater's MAC to connect to the router would do the trick - but I wondered if perhaps, rather than solving my problem, this might actually just mean that some connections (ones that try the router) simply fail...

 

Does anyone have any idea if my solution will work - or if there is a better one...? There is, at present, no encryption on the network - although I'd like to do that at some point in the future...

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at worst you could give it a shot :)

 

and I suggest you put encryption on at least, otherwise your email passwords and web browsing is all flying through the air for anyone to read. I was messing with kismet once, and what did I find? my neighbour had no encryption and in rolled their email username, password, and the emails they were sending and receiving.

 

James

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  • 5 weeks later...

I do intend to set up encryption but it's not urgent as no-one around here has wireless... Once it's beyond my router it's all plain text anyway!

 

I also did try using the MAC filtering to get it working but it only seems to allow one device to be connected at any one time... :unsure:

 

Does anyone have any other ideas as to how I might get this working? My signal strength/consistency is much better when using the router...

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I would configure it for just one of the access points and ensure that the SSID is unique on both router and repeater. That way, if you're machine is only configured to connect to one wireless access point with the correct SSID, you shouldn't have a problem.

 

My neighbours have access points and my machines never connect to theirs even though I can see them perfectly fine. My system is only configured to access one access point by it's SSID.

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For the repeater to work it needs to have the same SSID as the router... My machines are also configured to only access that SSID - and they should always go for the strongest signal but, for some reason they don't...

 

Repeaters seem to be more expensive and more difficult to setup. Maybe you could try using a high gain antenna.

 

The repeater being expensive is irrelevant since I've already bought it! Actually it's not irrelevant because it's more incentive to get the thing working!

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I would hide the SSID on both and then delete the router's wireless connection from the computers' access lists. Then set them up on the repeater's SSID.

 

That way the router is invisible unless explicitly connected to and the computers will automatically connect to the repeater, once configured.

 

It might also be possible to set up bridging so that the router signal is dedicated bridge, but this depends on the capabilities of your router + repeater.

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Pardon my ignorance... Shouldn't the repeater and router have the same SSID?

 

Yes, he says in his post here:

 

For the repeater to work it needs to have the same SSID as the router...

 

although I have no more ideas on how phunni could get this to work unfortunately.

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Yes, he says in his post here

That's what I thought too, therefore I can't see how SoulSe's suggestion to silence the router can help. The PC must know the SSID to connect to the network, so even if you the router is silent, the PC will find it 'cause it knows its SSID. My understanding is that the drivers and the network connection manager make sure the wireless NIC connects to a stronger signal. They also run some power management on the card, so if the signal is weak, they drop off connection and try to connect again. I think something similar happens with your network. Are you able to monitor the signal strength? On my router, the signal strength fluctuates substantially. I even had to turn the router side-wise to ensure the antenna pattern is right for the environment.

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I have bridging mode on my ADSL router and wireless access point. I wonder if they need different SSID's when in bridging mode or whether this is the same as repeater.

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I didn't see that they needed to have the same SSID.

My understanding is that different SSIDs mean different networks. Therefore, if I move from the area covered by the router (SSID1) to the area covered by the repeater (SSID2), I have to manually disconnect from the network SSID1 and connect to the network SSID2. In principle, this is Okay, but not having to reconnect manually would be a lot more covenient, especially when signals are weak and drop-offs are frequent.

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My understanding is that different SSIDs mean different networks. Therefore, if I move from the area covered by the router (SSID1) to the area covered by the repeater (SSID2), I have to manually disconnect from the network SSID1 and connect to the network SSID2. In principle, this is Okay, but not having to reconnect manually would be a lot more covenient, especially when signals are weak and drop-offs are frequent.

Not if you're making use of wireless bridging.

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