| [Wireless] opinion on network topology and remote re-booting Sorry for the long story in advance:
Our 11 unit condominium shares a 6 Mbit Comcast signal. The building is a long rectangle with all units facing the street. There is an equipment space at the back of the building that runs the length of the building where all water heaters and furnaces live as well as our boiler for the snowmelt driveway system.The Comcast modem is at one end. We previously were using a wireless provider that gave us slower, less stable service.
The building is not a full time residence for anyone, they are all second home/vacation rentals. The Internet traffic was originally set up to go from the comcast modem to a Buffalo wireless 4 port Access point. From there it broadcast wirelessly to another Buffalo down the space about 80' and from there to yet another one about 80' beyond that. This system was not very stable and provided intermittent service. We hired a network guy to "fix" it. His solution was to hard-wire the second and third Buffalo's to the first one. This provided much improved speed and stability. The only odd thing is that when you try to log on to the network, you are presented with three different Buffalo's to choose from; HOA1, HOA2, HOA3.
One of the ongoing problems with the old wireless setup was the frequent need to reset the equipment whenever we lost our wireless signal. The problem with this was that we had to pay someone to go up there and unplug and plug back in the equipment to refresh the IP. It added up to a fair amount of money. Comcast appears to be more stable, but there is still the issue of needing to occasionally reboot equipment.
I found this gadget that would allow us to do this remotely:
»www.cpscom.com/gprod/arr.htm
It is a power strip with a phone jack. If someone dials the number and no one answers in 6 rings, it automatically reboots the power strip, causing the router to be reset.
The networking guy said that if you were rebooting the devices to be careful to reboot them in sequence so they aren't fighting with each other to get and IP. Is this a valid concern? This device would just about pay for itself the first time it was needed! |
 PeeWeePremium
join:2001-10-21
Madera, CA
2 edits | I believe he told you right. They can all be shut down at the same time but need to be started in sequence. Shutting off dhcp and assigning static ip's may be a solution, but no one would be able to log on wirelessly without also having static ip's. Not a good idea.
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My grandkids ARE cuter than yours!  |
