Is this possible: Heres the scenaro
Merchandise company setting up for 1 day at an arena that has a DSL or cable connection. The company has 40 WIFI credit card machines that will be spread out all over the place.
Is it possible to pre configure several (about 16) WRAPS or router boards with WDS and hard wire the first unit and just start stringing then along the concoarse of the venue? Is this even possible? or are there any other options besides stringing alot of cat5.
Thank you
COMON somebody chime in
All these gurus in here and no opinion !
Is it possible? Sure. Is it as easy as just hanging them with minimal configs? I don’t think so. Unless you are quite familiar with STP or OSPF, I think your only bet is to preconfigure all of the WDS links before hand (or once you’ve hung them but before the event). We’ve had mixed results with wds in dynamic mode for this kind of application. Preconfiguring all of the hops isn’t that bad as long as you know the paths beforehand and mount them based on those paths.
You might want to also pre-auth all of those CC machines with an access list and turn off default-authentication to keep random ab/users off the network.
If I understand what your trying to do correctly, you should be able to use a AP Bridge, and WDS Slave combination. Using this method it is very easy to pre-configure all the router boards with a dynamic WDS style setup, thus making it very easy, and fast to deploy.
You could use two interfaces. Dedicate 1 interface (maybe on 5ghz) to your backhauls, running with dynamic WDS, and use the second interface on 802.11b/g (2.4ghz) for your c.card machines.
Enable dynamic WDS and dynamic bridging for all your 5ghz interfaces. Also make sure the 2.4ghz interfaces are in the same bridge. If I’m not mistaken, STP takes care of all the loops. Just keep in mind that it will take a while for the whole thing to settle before it will be usable, but once it’s up and running it should keep going (and maybe even self heal if any MT across the chain fails during the event).