[PLUG] afraid to ask (wireless bridge...microsoft)

["M. Jackson Wilkinson" <jackw@jounce.net>]

Hey everyone,

I saw a decent rebate at OfficeMax for the MS Wireless Base Station, and 
decided that it was a good price for something that can be either a 
wireless and ethernet bridge on my current home network (for right now), 
or a NAT-providing router/gateway when I'm living in an apartment at school.

So I hooked up this thing, to my current network, which consists of (in 
part) a DSL modem going into the uplink of a switch, and then a cat5 
cable from my switch up to my room.  I previously had a small switch in 
my room, and had the incoming cat5 going into the uplink port on that. 
Everything worked fine, though I didn't want the router mode on, just 
the bridge, since I have a DHCP and NAT setup on my network already. 
The incoming cable was plugged into the "modem" slot, which I assume to 
be essentially an uplink slot.

When I switched the device over to bridge mode (via a software 
modification... it has web administration and such), everything went to 
hell.  Well, not everything.  The local network continued to work 
flawlessly, but it created enormous latency on my DSL circuit.  I went 
from 0% packet loss and 18ms average pings to upwards of 90% packet 
loss, with occasional bursts of ~20ms pings sandwiched between one or 
two enormous pings (ie 6000 ms, etc).

If I unplug the cable from the uplink, the latency goes away, and all is 
well again (after a few seconds of recovery).  Put it back in, and the 
network instantly goes back into the state described above.  Putting the 
cable into another one of the 4 normal ethernet jacks on the device 
yields no linklight, so I figure it must go into the "modem" jack.

Before I risk hours on hold tomorrow, am I being entirely dumb about 
something?  Am I missing something entirely?  Right now, best-case 
scenario would be for this device to act as a hub/switch/whatever for my 
room and provide the rest of my house with an 802.11b bridge so wireless 
devices can use my present DHCP server.

Thanks for the help,
Jack


_________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group        --       http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug