The WDS/Extending network blues

Gather round friends whilst I ask a little question.

Just had BT infinity installed (huzzah!) and getting some lovely download speeds. Problem is it's installed in the ground floor of a rather tall old house where previously my ADSL was plugged in upstairs.

No problem I think, I have old networking gear around, I'll plug my apple airport extreme base station into the modem and connect the upper floors via WDS/extending the network.

So, I have an AEBS and an old Netgear DG834N. Both support WDS, but I am having no joy getting the two to connect at all. As far as I can tell the wireless channel and security is the same on both, they have IP addresses in the same subnet (and both different) and I've ensured they both know about the MAC of the other to talk to one another.

Will they talk? Will they heck! The logs on the AEBS see the MAC of the DG834 but only to tell me they've been disauthenticated. Now this suggests a problem with the wireless security, but having tried all of the options (barring using none at all *shudder*) nothing seems to work.

Has anyone else ever got a scenario like this to work at all?

Thanks for reading!

S.

While you wait for a proper answer... I have had a related need for several years, and afaict WDS seems to be a bit of a mirage. There seems to be no guarantee that different vendors kit will interoperate, indeed there seems to be not much chance that two sets of non-identical kit from the same vendor will interoperate. You may need to throw away what you have and replace the lot with kit that some kind supplier will certify will do what you want. Do not expect this to be cheap.

Of course I could be wrong and mixed-model WDS might now work just fine, in which case I'll be delighted.

I have a bad bad feeling that you are right and that WDS across different vendors does not exist.

That said, I am also an eternal optimist and shall keep fingers crossed that this is not the case and I can either figure it out (and post results here) or some kind soul will provide me with some illumination in this matter!

S.

I wouldn't use WDS.

I would look at setting up your other routers to work as access points, and link them back to the main one using CAT5 or Powerline adapters.

(this is what I do at home and it works a treat)

same chipset and firmware versions usually work

doesn't necessarily mean same vendor nor does same vendor guarantee WDS interoperability.

Does it work without encryption, if not you're going to need to change at least one bit of hardware. I would buy a pair of identical WDS compatible gadgets if powerline doesn't float your boat.

I did get a Belkin AP to WDS repeat a Belkin router for a doctor, also I had a string of Buffalo 54G routers running around my place as a test.