WiFi extension question

[Michael Butash]

Wireless is fairly strict, it's usually one client to one wireless
association, even if using a client ethernet bridge inline - they usually
only expect one mac address to pass (not if you have a client wifi bridge
with 5 devices behind it).  This is at least in the enterprise-world ala
Cisco or Aruba.

I've not used one of these consume "wifi repeaters", but what I presume
they're doing is some sort of either network address translation, or some
mac address rewriting to make work, so all traffic looks like one host, or
in essence another router.  Not much different from your cell phone doing
tethering over cell (unless you use apple crap, ugh).

What I'd say to do is look for one of these repeaters, or client bridges,
put it as close to the signal as possible, output the ethernet jack to the
WAN side of a consumer router/firewall, and wire the LAN ports back to
whatever you have there, or use it's wireless to send your own SSID off the
router wifi for your clients indoors.  If a repeater can't pick up the
signal, get one with an external antenna receptical, I'm sure someone makes
one, and get the cantenna as mentioned to point at your neighbor's signal.

[neighbor wifi] -- [your wifi repeater] -- [router wan port] --
[wired/wireless clients] -- win!

The router will look like a normal single mac/client to the bridge, which
should be good enough to pass over it to the neighbor wifi.   This will
need to NAT traffic properly to do so, but most routers/firewalls do this
anyways.

I've never had to get very creative to hijack others' wifi to get others on
with more than one client, without just breaking in with a single client
and plundering that way, but in theory this should be sound, as long as the
upstream wifi sees a 1:1 relation between client, mac-address, and traffic.

-mb


On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 12:49 PM David Schwartz <newsletters at thetoolwiz.com>
wrote:

> My question is rooted in the fact that I don’t really understand what an
> “Access Point” can do — if they can serve as the source of an internet
> connection the same way as your cable modem’s internet device. It seems
> like they should. But there’s the question of how you log into them and set
> them up to talk to the remote router in question. I guess that will vary by
> device.
>
> As for the VOIP interfaces, yes I’ve had several of them myself. I’ve got
> a couple from NetTalk in a box that I don’t use, one that supports WiFi and
> one that doesn’t.
>
> The difference is, you plug a POTS phone into them. Not a router.
>
> -David Schwartz
>
>
> On Oct 14, 2019, at 12:16 PM, Carruth, Rusty <Rusty.Carruth at smartm.com>
> wrote:
>
> I believe the answer is ‘yes, you can have the wifi “range extender” work
> that way’.
>
> Longer answer - my daughter once had a VOIP phone that required an
> Ethernet cable, could not use wifi.
> She only had wifi, but the company that she was working for also supplied
> a ‘wifi access box’ (about the size of a wall wart!, with an Ethernet jack)
> that she could use to ‘convert’ WiFI into wired for the phone they gave her
> Worked great.  And I **think** that you weren’t limited to a single
> device on the wire….
>
>
> Rusty
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
> https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.phxlinux.org/pipermail/plug-discuss/attachments/20191014/f443c4ed/attachment.html>