We're doing a deployment for a customer that owns a marina.  Surveying
the property shows that there are over 80 broadcasting 802.11b/g APs
visible.  

 

Because of this, we want to place our APs as close to the clients as
possible.  What I was planning on doing was using the WRAP boards with
dual PCMCIA slots and making one a 802.11b/g radio and the other an
802.11a radio for the backhaul.

 

I was planning on running m0n0wall for this, but have been stymied by
some early testing.

 

1.)    Would I be able to bridge the 802.11b radio to the 802.11a radio?
The 802.11b radio will be acting in 'hostap' mode, but the other will be
in BSS mode. 

2.)    If I have to route, can I set all the APs to use the same subnet?
That way customers can still roam between APs.  I don't think that will
cause a problem, do you?

3.)    Do I set the 802.11a interface as the "WAN" interface?  This
seems to have broken my test m0n0wall config.  (It no longer responds on
the LAN port.)

4.)    If I do this, how do I configure the wireless settings of the
m0n0wall? 

5.)    If I don't do this, how do I set my default route properly?

 

 

Thanks in advance for taking the time to at least read this far!
Obviously, I can do all the above with an embedded linux without the
nice GUI that m0n0wall provides, but our support team has grown used to
the m0n0wall GUI, so it'd be nice to continue that.

 

m.