Help in setting up a 2nd access point

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sen8or

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#153668 4-Oct-2014 12:31

I currently have a Fritzbox 7390 as our main router/wireless access point, but down one end of the house, wifi is dodgy at best.

I have a spare belkin f5d7644-4 wireless g router sitting around. Is it possible to use this as an extender?

The house is wired cat5e so I can easily connect the belkin to a spare wired port on my switch, but just not sure how to set it up, or if it's even possible, so that it communicates with the Fritzbox and the fibre connection?

I've tried google, but could only see things on port forwarding, perhaps my googlefu is weak.

Any plain English help would be appreciated

Cheers

Sen

Aredwood

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#1147172 4-Oct-2014 13:07

In short. connect the belkin to just your computer. Log into it and disable DHCP, set it's wifi SSID and password to the same as the fritzbox, set the Wifi channel to a different channel to the one that the fritzbox uses. Change it's IP address to something like 192.168.178.250 (last time I checked the fritzbox uses the 192.168.178.x IP range)

Then connect the belkin to the fritzbox and test it out. Main things needed to get this setup working. Both routers need to use the same IP range. (fritzbox uses the 192.168.178.x IP range if I remember correctly) Only 1 router can have DHCP enabled

If you have trouble I also have a fritzbox 7390 but it is at a friends house. So I can compare settings to your setup. I have been meaning to get it back as I need another access point at my place. But will be doing the opposite to you - using the fritzbox as the second access point.

markg1275

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#1147259 4-Oct-2014 17:34

Hi sen8or,

Just incase your not so hot on sub-netting here is a brief that might help you.

On your computer connected to the Fritz box go to start then command prompt, you can just search for cmd and press enter to get it up.

Once you have that open type "IP Config" and press enter

You will get a bunch of text and there are a few important things you need to know.

First start with your subnet mask. For a home network it should be 255.255.255.0 what this essentially means is the first 3 octets (the numbers separated by a ".") of your IP address (just above your subnet mask) are your network address. All your computers, devices, routers etc need to be using the same first 3 octets but the last octet can be anything from 1-254. I won't bother talking about why you can't use 0 or 255 as its beyond the scope of this.

Now your default gateway is where your PC sends all its traffic that's leaving the home network such as internet access and this should be your router. Its common to use .1 or .254 for this as its nice and tidy.

So an example would be

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection 2:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : fritz.box
IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.109
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.254

Here my fritz box is 192.168.1.254 Within my network "192.168.1.x" And all my devices, printers etc can be anything from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.253. Every device must have a unique IP address in your network.

If I was to set up an old router I would as above turn off DHCP on the old router I was going to use as an access point and set it's LAN IP address to 192.168.1.253 to keep it tidy.

If you don't already know DHCP is the service on a router that hands out IP address to devices so you don't have to manually set everything up. You want to make sure its off on the old router or it will tell PCs to route traffic to it for the internet but it has no internet connection. You should not need to touch your DHCP settings on your Fritz box but it might be worth checking it does not conflict with the IP address you are going to use for the old router. Most are set to issue 100 IP address or so from for example x.x.x.1 to x.x.x.100 Sorry if this is teaching you to suck eggs if you already know any of the above, just trying to gauge your understanding of IP Addressing.

Once you know this stuff it suddenly becomes very simple and a piece of cake.

Let me know if somethings not clear and I can put it in better context.

raytaylor

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#1147459 5-Oct-2014 02:45

I hate belkin as a technician, but the one thing I do love about them is they have a "User as AP Mode" checkbox which makes them super super easy to dumb down into a plain access point + 5 port switch.

See my signature below for a guide to explaining how this all works.

Ray Taylor

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sen8or

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#1147821 5-Oct-2014 19:19

Thanks folks.

Once I dumbed down the ssid on both devices (it had Fritzbox!7390 blah blah as an ssid name) to something short, it seemed to work and I now have 1 happy daughter with wifi in her bedroom at full strength. My iphone didnt seem to want to hand over from 1 to the other, but her ipod did.

Cheers

Sen

raytaylor

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#1148500 6-Oct-2014 19:06

Different devices will handover at different signal strengths.
If you have a windows computer, you can often use the device manager to edit the advanced properties of the network interface controller.
There is often an option in there to make it more "sticky" or "roam-y"

But devices like cellphones and tablets usually lack that customisation.

Ray Taylor

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sen8or

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#1150248 8-Oct-2014 20:40

Still not 100%

No longer letting devices join, can see it on the list at full strength, but comes up unable to join. Looking through the settings on the router, firewall is enabled. I assume this should be disabled? Given it's the 2nd router behind the fritz box is there any risk disabling the firewall?