im working in a hospital and we have 4 floors and 1 AP in each floor all connected thought our wired network to the main Closet that houses a linksys wired router connected to a T1. right now all 7 have there own ssid and dhcp turned on. i was wondering if i wanted to make all these ap’s work as one central AP so that users did not see 7 differnet ssid’s. Im thinking WDS is the way to go. In my mind i need to set up one AP somewhere and the rest as a WDS bridge right? But can i use wired ethernet to bridge them? or does it have to be wireless? All AP’s are connected through switchs at each floors’ closet and can not be bridged through wireless. I wanted to get this part right before we started on patient rooms which would add some 26 more AP’s to this network to cover the 2 campus’s
Any help would be great, just wanted to make sure i was headed in the right direction
i did this, 8 APs in my dads house. bridge the wireless and ethernet ports. only run dhcp from a central router on that lan. make all ssid the same. you cannot use WPA however because of random keys between each. dont need any WDS or fancy setups.
my prob is when a patient try’s to connect he will see say 5 at a time and wonder which he needs to connect. I would like to try to set up a roaming profile for them and it show up as only 1 AP. playing around today i was able to get wds running but it seems it is using the wlan to link the AP’s not the the Ethernet cable. i can’t link them with wireless as not all of them can see each other. i set one 411a as ap and the other one was set to wds slave. and it worked great with roaming. But when i tried the third i ran into connection issue. mostly i want to set this up like a hotel i am sure not all their aps are able to see each other so i know there is a way to bridge through Ethernet. maybe wds is not the answer as i can’t seem to get it to work if they can not see each other. i might also just being confusing myself more then anything. The reason i don’t want to just set them all to the same ssid is when we do patient rooms there will be 5 ap’s per floor and im sure there will be overlapping coverage and when they try to connect they will scan and see all the ones on that floor and prob many other random ones. How do hotels do this?
oh well i guess im stuck having multiply ap’s avail to people just wish there was a way to do a wds type link through ethernet cable instead of wireless. just kinda strange a option like this isnt’ avail
anothing thing i think you didnt understand. if you have 7 APs all broadcasting under the same SSID you will only see one SSID, so the end user only has 1 option. When the client loses a signal it will attach to the next strongest found. No WDS necessary since your using ethernet.