----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 5:39
AM
Subject: [smartBridges] Why not to use
smartBridge...
So far I've come up with three good reasons to
not continue to use smartBridges but I'm open to suggestions for fixing these
problem. Pardon my frustration but I have 3 years of wireless experience and
its taking me more than 10 hours of fiddling to get a simple Wireless Bridge
to Wireless Bridge up and running and I am sitting here with more problems
than solutions right now.
1) Last week I plugged the ethernet side of an
APPO into an APCC PNET4 ethernet surge supressor where there where three other
devices plugged in. This caused severe packet loss on the other devices.
Pinging the other devices between each other would result in 4 out of 10 pings
timeing out.
SOLUTION: Bypass the ethernet
surge supressor.
2) Right now I have two APPO's configured in
Wireless Bridge mode (which won't work, see #3). At my NOC side its plugged
into a D-Link DES3226 Managed Switch. If I put the APPO into Access Point
mode, it KILLS the traffic on my switch entirely to the point where
workstations and servers can barely reach each other. As soon as I unplug the
APPO's ethernet connection from the switch,
immediately everything goes back to normal. This has happened twice now in my
quest to get my wireless link working.
SOLUTION: No idea. Maybe
avoid Access Point mode?
3) I have to admit I did enjoy 3 minutes of
Wireless Bridge mode where everything worked as it was expected, but I got
adventerous and enabled WEP. This did not work out for some reason and now,
after disabling WEP... I cannot get the Wireless Bridge mode to work again.
I've reset to Defaults and started over, still nothing. I simply cannot get
Wirless Bridge to Wireless Bridge mode to work at this point. I've been
through the "recycling both sides", "double checking MAC#'s", etc. You'd think
that if this was going to work at all, I would have accidentally made it work
by now.
SOLUTION: None as of
yet.
Clearly, when considering points #1 and #2
above, there is more happening on the ethernet side of the link than just
ethernet. Something is different than a standard ethernet connection
because this radio clearly caused major packet loss between the other devices
plugged into am ethernet surge supressor. Maybe power is leaking through
from the PowerShot device? And, its ability to completely bring a managed
switch to its knees just reassures this.
===
Rick Kosick
StarLinX Internet
Service
