On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 11:52:57PM -0400, William Park via talk wrote:
Anyone have this one? http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=27_1046_365&item_id=087761 http://www.tplink.ca/en/products/details/TL-WR802N.html If so, have you ever used its "Client Mode" and can you confirm that it works?
I need small portable "wireless bridge", and the advertised "client mode" is what I need. But, last TP-Link I bought was N750 dual-band TL-WDR4300. It advertised "wireless bridge" and even their tech support said so. But, both lied. Shocking!
I have Linksys WRT model with DD-WRT, and its client bridge works. But, it's a bit bulky to carry around.
Wireless bridging is actually quite tricky. Wifi expects connections to an AP to be for ONE mac address only. This makes doing bridging tricky if you expect more than one device to use the bridge. Doing a bridge for a single wired device to allow wifi is simple, just use the mac address of that device for the connection to the AP and it will work. However if you try to do multiple devices behind one bridge, now what? The AP will per the standard only allow traffic from one MAC for a given connection, so either the bridge has to do MAC address NAT (which is tricky to get right), or you could do the full layer 3 NAT instead and just handle it that way (which seems to be the common cheap solution since it actually works and does what most people want, and allow internet access from clients and nothing else). Now if you use WDS things get better, but unfortunately it isn't apparently quite an official standard so it might only work if all the wifi devices involved are from the same vendor. WDS can be used to setup a mesh network of repeaters, or it can be used for bridging and solves the MAC address issue by adding an extra field to store the MAC address of the sender in addition to the existing field for the MAC address of the wifi sender (which would be the bridge device). Various vendors have had proprietary WDS type things to allow two APs of the same model to work as a base station and a bridge together, and they use their own extensions to allow multiple MAC addresses behind one wifi connection to get through. This is the same thing that is preventing running a VM in bridged mode on a laptop with a wifi link. If you do full NAT you are fine, but if you are trying to run a VM as a server and make it accessible to the network you are out of luck. -- Len Sorensen