| reply to christcorp
Re: Actiontec GT701-WG as Access Point? Yes, it's working fine Mike. In fact I have now disconnected the other access point. Turning off DHCP was one of the first things I did. Msj is correct that the WAN side is not involved; it perpetually and unsuccessfully tries to connect to a DSL provider, but it doesn't appear to affect the LAN ports. The LAN ports act like they are on a single switch, except that I did have to assign the Actiontec an IP address on the router's LAN subnet.
Msj's comment about the Actiontec not trying to get an IP address on the local side brings up an interesting comparison. My Linksys WCG200 works as an access point only when I assign an IP address on the LAN side AND allow it to get its IP address from my router on the WAN side. Note that it gets that IP address from my router not through its cable port (which is where you would expect the WAN interface to be), but through an Ethernet port. It appears that the Ethernet port on the WCG200 can operate as both a WAN connection and a LAN connection. I don't know why it needs an IP address on its WAN side in order to function, but it does. Possibly this relates to the way cable internet operates as opposed to DSL. For the cable modem, the choice is either static or dynamic IP addressing, whereas DSL has various flavors of PPP. In any event, setting a static WAN address won't work. It needs to get a WAN address through DHCP; it needs to get that address from my router; and it is connected to my router via Ethernet. Unless these conditions are met, I can't reach the internet through this device (although I can reach other devices on my network).
As for the Actiontec, the reason it took me so long to set it up was that I had a physical cable problem. I tried the correct configuration early on, but I didn't realize that there was a problem with the Ethernet jack I was using. For comfort, I moved to a different room, and continued trying different configurations. After seeing msj's post last night, I tried the correct configuration again, this time using a different jack, and voila, it worked.
Thanks, all, for helping me work through this. |
