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Repeaters can work well if your backhaul (the signal you want to repeat) is 5ghz 802.11n and the repeater broadcasts on 2.4ghz. Very few people will have this particular setup, though. But, if you got it, rock it. Same-band repeating, is, as you noted, universally poo poo. FWIW this is how Walmart distribution centers provide coverage for their parking lots (well, 802.11a for the backhaul, but same concept)
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Oct 22, 2011 11:09
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CuddleChunks posted:
This is not how antennas work. Radio antennas are reciprocal devices - every decibel of gain you have on transmit you also have on receive. So, even though you still have the crappy laptop antenna on the other end of the house, your AP has a very focused ear pointing right at it, giving you better reception AND transmission.
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Oct 24, 2011 20:35
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Wheelchair Stunts posted:I was under the impression that while the AP does have a more focused ear, it also has a lot more noise to try to get a decent SnR from that bitty transmitter that is now competing with who knows how much more noise than before. Not quite, but good thinking. Antennas are passive devices, meaning that they do not amplify signals; it's a zero sum game. Whatever signal is enhanced in a particular direction has to be counteracted by worse signal in another direction. Antennas have what is called a field pattern which is a 3-D plot of how strong a signal is in relation to the antenna. Strong spots are lobes, dead spots are nulls. Simple omni antennas look like a donut with the antenna stuck through the hole. Best reception is perpendicular, worst reception is off the ends. It's a pretty fat donut though, and you still have good signal strength when you're at an angle to the antenna, so a boring low gain omni antenna is great when you want to give coverage across two floors of a house, for example. High gain omni antennas squish that donut, for lack of a better term. So you have stronger signals in the plane perpendicular to the antenna, but less leeway for being above or below the AP. This is why high gain omnis are bad for trying to cover multiple floors. Directional antennas take the donut and stretch it out very disproportionately in one direction, usually along the long axis of the antenna, but for patch antennas it's perpendicular to the plane of the patch. Directional antennas make up their very high forward gain by being deaf as a post in other directions. To tie it all back in, background RF noise is by and large random and coming at you from random angles, so if you've got great ears in one direction where your signal is, and you're deaf to everything else, that background noise doesn't rise in level nearly as much as your signal. For extreme interference solutions there are things like cardioid antennas which have roughly omnidirectional coverage except for one designed-in dead spot (and it's very, very dead). You use these not by aiming the lobe at the desired signal, but by aiming the null at the noise you want to ignore.
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Oct 26, 2011 11:10
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MJP posted:I'm looking at setting up three rooms with Cat6 drops. Does anyone have a recommendation on good bulk cable? I'm looking at http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10234&cs_id=1023401&p_id=8107&seq=1&format=2 but I didn't know if there was any significant difference between riser and in-wall rated. In-wall is just boring normal CAT6 generally. Plenum rated is more expensive and is meant to be used in air handling spaces (run through air ducts); it does not give off much in the way of toxic fumes. Riser rated is basically fire-retardant in-wall, it is not certified to be run through ducts but can be run between floors. Plenum is overkill, but classy. Also, is there a reason you're using cat6? 10gigE access ports are still like five, ten years off, as is the technology to take advantage of them. Furthermore, cat6 is larger and more delicate/bitchy than cat5e. For gigabit, assuming correct termination and length limits, there is no difference.
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Nov 1, 2011 16:04
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Ephphatha posted:
Lacing will probably outlast the CAT5 jacket, and I recommend it. Big fan of that greybeard lost art. Hook and loop strips will get filthy on the floor and lose adhesion over time, cable ties are obviously out. It's no slower to add a cable to a laced harness than it is with cable ties, and more secure than with velcro. Jonny 290 fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Jan 12, 2012 |
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Jan 12, 2012 13:25
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This is like the edge casest of corner cases, but does anybody have any insight as to how I could get cross-subnet Windows network browsing working? My wired and wired nets are on different subnets, and though I can directly access by IP, it'd be very nice and clean to be able to browse the whole network instead of just whichever side I'm on. Routing is pfSense 2, main smb server is just a generic debian+samba box.
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Jan 18, 2012 09:07
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elite_garbage_man posted:It is possible, you just need to set the pc as a gateway. In windows this feauture is called internet sharing. However, you should get the NAS wired directly to the router. Your transfer speeds are going to be very slow going from one wireless pc to another. Moreover, if you DO use a crossover cable, and it's not a gig crossover cable, you'll fall back to 100mbps. This bit me a time or two.
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Feb 2, 2012 10:19
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I think he's saying that all of the APs need to be cabled back to a central switch. Do not use repeaters. For every repeater you have in the chain, your throughput is halved.
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Feb 4, 2012 12:08
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At this point in time, honestly I would not do structured cabling. They charge you a premium (thinking you're that a contractor that is just going to pass the cost on to the customer) for it, and coax as an in-house delivery method seems to be going away. U-verse, for example, can be deployed exclusively over CAT5 or better. If you do want to run coax and cat5 bundled, i would probably buy separate spools and bundle them or even better run them separated by a foot or two. That way you can get the best deal on coax, or at least not overpay for crap coax.
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Feb 23, 2012 14:22
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It's doable, you will need to aim antennas carefully. You have about 120 dB of path loss over a ~5100 meter run at 5 GHz in free air. Napkin math: the Nanostation you posted will do 23 dBm (200 mW) output power. Stack that up with the 22 dB you get from the antenna, minus connector loss and you've got about 45 dBm. Pull the 120 dB path loss off and you have signal levels of -75 dBm. It'd be marginal. You may need to get something with a little more gain or power. The other setup would be better - 26 dBi antenna + 25 dBm source = 51 dBm, minus the 120 dB for path loss, gives you about -69 at the receiving end - better, but still not great. It should sustain a link, though. Cabling losses and all of that will take those numbers down a bit, too. The downside is that antenna beamwidth (literally the angular width of the most powerful signal it emits or receives) is inversely proprtional to antenna gain. So that 26 dBi antenna, if its gain is accurate, is going to be a bit of a laser. You're going to need to aim these very accurately at both ends. Doable, but it will take a team to aim them (one person at each antenna with radio or conference call, one person at a computer watching signal strength at each end also on radio/conference). Unfortunately this is one of those situations right on the cusp between "you can do this yourself" and "you might need to get a Dude out there". If you want to experiment and have the ability to return some of the gear and upsize if needed, go for it - it will be a fun project. Jonny 290 fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Feb 24, 2012 |
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Feb 24, 2012 10:43
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No, you're spitting data over cat5, that's not the issue. At 5 GHz, signal loss is _extremely_ high in even short runs of cable and connectors. You should expect that each connector in the chain chop off, oh, 0.1 to 0.5 dB of signal. Even that short run of cable has 0.1 dB or so of loss in it. Plus, the connections at each end of that cable, from the coax itself to the connector, have a small bit of loss. I mean all told it's probably hacking like 1 dB off of your signal strength, but just be aware of it.
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Feb 24, 2012 11:59
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I'm pretty sure ethernet is optoisolated and you should not ground either end. If you're using shielded cable, yes, the shield should be grounded at exactly one end. That being said, commodity electronics manufacturers are notorious for ignoring specs, so if it were me I would absolutely put a $10 dumb switch on either end of that outside run as sacrifical devices, just in case you get some stupid poo poo going on.
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Feb 26, 2012 09:22
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Ninja Rope posted:You could use UTP<->Fiber ethernet converters to get around electrical and distance concerns, but they'll run $100+ each. Yeah, that's an angle. Hell, if power's not a concern I bet for $50 you could find two Cisco 2900XLs with fiber modules still in them on eBay or something.
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Feb 26, 2012 10:21
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Zero VGS posted:I just bought a 2200mW Wifi adapter. It's amazing and gets 4-bar signals from blocks away. My question is, is this thing really drawing 2.2 watts from a single USB port? That seems like it's cutting it close to the theoretical limits, and I'm afraid something is going to catch fire. Wait a second. Did you buy something like this? http://www.amazon.com/NextG-USB-Yagi-Range-antenna-2200mW/dp/B0044D7J1W If that's the case, they sold you a 200 mW wifi adapter hooked to a Yagi antenna to give you 11-12 dB of gain. It's not actually two point two watts of power. These things are kind of crap and not weatherproof, but safe to run on USB. Jonny 290 fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Mar 2, 2012 |
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Mar 2, 2012 16:27
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Golbez posted:
Even on lovely asymmetric cable modems, you need to send ACK packets back for all those gigabytes you're downloading. These aren't big, but your guy on the remote end won't send another packet until you ACK (let's simplify here, beards). If your cable modem is TOO asymmetric (as a modem with upload problems would have), you would have enough timeouts/losses on the ACK packets that everything would 'stop working' for a few seconds. When I max out my 3mbps/384k cable download, I can't even sustain an inbound SSH console session.
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May 26, 2012 12:57
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Your VLAN tags get stripped or ignored if you just plug trunks into bridges without any real configuration, but you can do it if you have bridges that support multiple SSIDs and trunking/VLANs. You set up one subinterface and SSID per VLAN, plug them in, all your traffic is trunked.
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Jun 2, 2012 11:07
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AustinJ posted:The answer to this question probably requires much deeper understanding of networking than I possess, but something about the whole IPv6 thing confuses me a bit. Ah, but mac addresses are not routed like IP packets. The only MACs a network cares about are the ones it can see. Your computer could have the exact same MAC as a webserver you're downloading a page from, and it won't care because you're not using the MAC to route from one end to another. Just to get a baseline idea of IPv6's domain size, I did the math and we could exhaust the IPv6 address space by giving every 0.3 grams of carbon on the planet Earth its own IPv6 address.
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Jun 7, 2012 08:16
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Check my thinking here. Setting up an RV with a Nanostation to leech wifi, and a Mikrotik to route. Turn on DMZ on the Nanostation and forward everything to the Mikrotik, and do NAT from the latter for the LAN? E: Got it. Bridge mode on the Nanostation routing page, set up a management IP, add a route/IP on the router to hit that, good to go. Jonny 290 fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 7, 2014 23:31
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Got a little edgerouter x that's locking up. Ran fine for months until I, get this, made the massive network redesign of putting the wall wart on a different power strip. Now it shits out every few hours. Firmware upped to latest, all the resets tried. Any solve I can try beyond RMA, which this thing's long out of window for?
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May 2, 2018 22:56
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I've swapped it out with a known good 12v 20 amp (yes) power supply set to 12.0 volts and even put an oscilloscope on the +V rail to make sure I wasn't getting noise on the rail. no dice. We retro'd all our changes and it's still locking up. I know people have had issues with these things just kind of dying, so I'm out of ideas, didn't know if there was a firmware flash I could do to allay some issues. Spouse did mention that it seemed to be locking up faster when she used two devices on the LAN (tv and phone or tv and laptop). i checked and NAT offloading is still enabled and I think working
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May 4, 2018 19:50
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Posted last week about my er-x problems. Switched to my Mikrotik. Ooooopsie it's an RB333 with old 3.1 firmware. It started rebooting every 90 minutes until I popped on and realized that even at 5-10 mbps traffic it was 100% cpu....wait, 1-2mbps, nobody in the house is doing anything..... They opened 8080 and turned that loving web proxy on. Got owned. Stay up on your firmware! Line 1 of latest ver is "uhh fixed a thing that lets randoms own your router" Fixed now. Gonna crack my ER-X and look for any bad caps or dust bunnies.
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May 7, 2018 21:34
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We're at 2.5hrs uptime on the ER-X with the top case removed. Goddamn thing was just cooking its own brains. Whatever chip that little heatsink is on is toastyyyyyyyy We'll see if it settles down and stabilizes. If so i'll just bolt an 80mm to the top of the open chassis and call er good.
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May 8, 2018 00:13
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I bolted a Nanostation Loco M2 to the outside of our RV, ran 13.8 volt PoE up an 80 foot non-outdoor-rated CAT5 cable, and the goddamned thing was at 808 days uptime when I took it down the day before I sold the motorhome. That's what pisses me off most about this - i don't understand why this thing is such a flakelord.
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May 8, 2018 18:42
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Can anybody help me with a config block for my centurylink fiber with an edgerouter lite? I've tried sixteen million variations and can never get Internet through it. i have been able to ping google dns from the router, etc. but i've never been able to get my LAN machines working on it yet. Super frustrated. pppoe, vlan tag 201, nothing special. I guess i'm just bad at configs. edit: problem solved. the config wizard sucks, doesn't actually create the pppoe link, and then after that the masquerade rule is set to masq to pppoe0 even though it forces you to create pppoe1. i'm up. Jonny 290 fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Dec 2, 2022 |
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Dec 2, 2022 02:03
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