Well, I finally purchased and installed a wifi hotspot at home. I just received a new laptop for (and from) work to assist me in managing some of my travel required workload. Anyway, let me tell you, it was not all roses to get it setup.
So, let me break down to you what I was working with initially before going into detail about what I had to do to get it all to work. My network previously consisted of the following: (from outside to inside)
Well, with the exception of the phone adapter, it seems like a pretty simple and standard multi-computer home network. I can certainly agree with that. However, to take it a little step forward, I also had port forwarding enabled for my server. It isn't a busy server, but it certainly has its uses.
So, as you can tell, my wired network is at capacity. I already have 5 ports in the house wired with the expectation to someday wire in a minimum of 3 more. Therefore, I thought I would kill a few birds with one stone when enlarging the capacity of my network. I figured that someone out there would have started to offer Wifi Access Point switches by now. Well, I was wrong. Really, all I needed was a switch, but I didn't have that option.
So, lets break it down for the less technical reading. An access point is a wireless device that you can add to an existing wireless or wired network. It will provide a certain radius of wireless communication to a network. A router is a device that will bridge networks together (ex: public network to/from private network) and/or do media conversions (ex: Thinnet to/from Ethernet). Consumer grade routers also include a switch. A switch is an Ethernet device that will provide the ability for other Ethernet devices to communicate. A switch is a smart hub that will read packet communication headers to determine to which Ethernet device to send the information. A hub is a Ethernet device that will broadcast every message from a device to every other device attached to it.
Ok, now that we have the hardware definitions out of the way, I can continue the episode. So, based on the previous description, I have a modem, 2 routers, and 4 computers. So, in the absence of an Access Point switch device available, I had to buy a wireless router to add to my network. This is so not what I wanted to fight with this weekend.
Lets breakdown the objectives to attain during the upgrade. My VOIP system still needs to function. All computers on the network wired or wireless need to be able to communicate to each other. My server still needs to be publicly available. The wifi network needs to be secured with the highest level of protection currently available, WPA2. And the number of available wired connections should be a minimum of 7.
Well, based upon those requirements, I've succeeded in most of them. At the time of writing, I have utterly failed on my VOIP requirement. Needless to say, the only thing I can do right now is call my voice mail and that is it. I can't even receive phone calls. I have the calls being forwarded to my cell phone and that isn't working either. And the other short coming was the reduction of the overall wired network potential is limited to 6. More on those topics later.
To get the network upgrade process started, I checked out the products available at Best Buy and determined that the $40 Linksys WRT54G2 Wifi-G router was the one I was going to get. And just for reference, this was less expensive than the Linksys Wifi-G access point that they were offering. While I was out, I also picked up a Targus laptop bag for when I travel as US Bank decided that I didn't need one. It wasn't a big deal. I likely got a better bag than they would have provided anyway.
Once home I now have the following equipment to make work together:
I began by plugging all of the equipment together (against the advice of the instructions). I had to locate the cable for my personal computer and plug it into the wifi router's switch. Once cabled in, I was able to access the configuration. The first thing that I found out is that the router would not permit me to set the WAN port IP address into the same range as the LAN IP address. Well, that's really a problem, how do I get all of my computers to be friendly to each other?
Well, the only option that I saw available was to create a crossover cable and consume an additional port on the wifi router, disable DHCP, and move on. This was all fine & dandy, but once I plugged in the crossover I was unable to access the web interface again. Now that I think about it, I think I forgot to change the LAN IP to cooperate with the network it was now on. Oh well. Therefore, I then resorted to tying to get the Wifi communication working.
I got into the wifi security settings; I enabled WPA2; I generated a network key; I saved my settings. Well, this would have been fine & dandy except the laptop would not connect to the network with all of the correct settings, or so I thought. The way the router's thick client user interface was setup, I honestly could not tell which it was using (WPA or WPA2). Therefore when I got to the laptop and it didn't make the distinction between WPA & WPA2, I didn't worry about it. The router didn't seem all that worried about the distinction, I figured the laptop would figure it out. Well, it didn't. I spent MANY and hour configuring, reconfiguring, reviewing the configuration, and quite a few Google searches. Everything seemed like a waste of time because I was getting nowhere quickly.
I finally broke down and asked if the laptop needed to specify WPA2 and why it wasn't an option in the Wifi configuration. After reading a few forums, I came across a post indicating that there was a patch from Microsoft that I would need. Once I installed the patch, the Wifi configuration made the distinction between WPA and WPA2. Therefore, I thought I was just about home. I then tried to connect to the network and was shot down. WTF?!?!? It was connecting, but couldn't pull an IP address but I wasn't being shown a dialog box or anything about any errors.
During my troubleshooting, I was starting to wonder if my parent network DHCP was going to work properly to provide wireless devices IP addresses. Therefore, I have switched the location of the wired & wireless devices. The wireless router is now the router and the wired router is the acting switch.
Ironically, I was able to pull IP addresses from unsecured networks. Since I was able to pull an address from my neighbors' networks, I didn't suspect an issue with my machine. I had checked the Windows Firewall several times just to be sure. Each time, on the General tab it said No, firewall was not enabled. I did a cursory check of McAfee to see if it was interfering, and didn't find any evidence to support that claim. Therefore, I was about to call it a night and wait until I could call a friend or two to see if they had any incite into the issue when an idea came to me. What does the error log say?
Well, the error log produced some very interesting results. An error was going ballistic on my Event Log. There were 3 or more messages being generated every second. Upon review of the error, I came to find that Windows Firewall was blocking traffic for DHCP. Why this was being blocked for secured and not on the unsecured networks, I don't know, but it was happening. I discovered after searching around on the internet that even if the Windows Firewall is listed in a disabled status with the ICS/Windows Firewall service running that it can still do stuff like this. Therefore, I promptly stopped and disabled the service. Would you believe that immediately following that change, the laptop popped right on the network. Amazing. Just simply amazing.
Anyway, lets see what has been accomplished at this point. VOIP service still works since the phone adapter is still working. Any machine, regardless of attached router is able to talk to another machine. WPA2 is working on the wireless network. 6 ports for wired devices are available. This just leaves my server to validate.
Unfortunately, this process too WAY to long to diagnose. I did the typical Linksys port forwarding configuration stuff. The ports for the services were defined and directed to the correct internal address. However, once I tried to pull up my server via an anonymizer, it was not responding. I rebooted each device through the network chain and still not improvement. I even assigned a static IP address to my server this time and still no improvement. Well, at some point I remember that the Phone Adapter device is a router. I don't recall what the configuration was prior to my network changes, but I know what happened to them at just about this point. I did a factory reset on it. At some point in the more recent past for this device, I some how locked myself out of it. Therefore, I was unable to get into it to see the configuration, let alone try to change it. Once I completed the factory reset I picked up the phone and I had ringtone. I thought my service was still working.
Then, using canyouseeme.org's open port checker, I was able to get a positive result. Then, via guardster.com, I was able to pull up my server's home page. So, majority of the items have been completed. Now, lets validate some things a bit more carefully.
So, what went wrong? Well, my provisioning file for my phone service went bye-bye in the factory reset. Therefore, with the provisioning file out of service, nothing works. No calls in, no calls out. Teleblend is my VOIP telephone service provider and they are not available on weekends. I have read online that the Phone Adapter will eventually pull a provisioning file and fix itself, but I wanted to be a bit more proactive than that, but was unable. Either my phone will be fixed before I go to work tomorrow or I will be placing an unhappy phone call first thing in the morning.
Resources used during my information discovery:
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Wifi Network Upgrade
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