When we moved into our new home almost two years ago, we chose a sun room to be our main office. It doesn’t really lend itself that well to an office in that there aren’t great places to hook up phones or to put network drops in. My thinking was that wifi would work well in a big open house with out a lot of walls. It did work pretty well with our laptops, but with desktops, we had varying results. The wireless cards in the back of the computer meant that the antennae were usually blocked by the case itself. The speed would shift back and forth, which would make the connection kind of flaky.
My first solution was to bring a Linksys WAP54G into the office to act as a second wireless access point. That did stabilize the connection, but it still wasn’t perfect. Plus, Kelly’s computer contains our music collection and sharing over wifi wasn’t always that quick. So, recently I acquired two Linksys WRT65GL wireless routers to attempt to build an isle of wire computers in my house. The builtin firmware didn’t cut it though. I did a couple quick Google searches, and found my way to OpenWRT.org and wiki.OpenWRT.org. The directions were simple as hell, and within a few mins I had flashed my routers with the Kamikaze 8.09 firmware.
The configuration was simple enough. Give each router an ip other than 192.168.1.1 and put it into bridge mode. Setup the wireless security and set the router to be a wireless client. Reboot, and viola! I created a wired isle inside my office and a second one in my hobby room/podcasting studio. I have an older iMac that can’t easily have a wifi card added to it, but now I can just wire it in.
Links that helped:
http://www.openwrt.org
http://wiki.openwrt.org
http://oldwiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs
