What to do with my spare Netopia 3347 routers.

Philbert

Hi folks,

I have a couple of spare unused Netopia 3347 Wireless ADSL routers. Before I try to flog them off I was wondeing if there was anyway I could use them for something. Any ideas?

I dont have dsl as I have wireless broadband but I would be interested in using them as basic wireless access points or hubs if that is possible.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks

Capt'n Midnight

I'd be interested to know if you can get them to talk to each other via the ADSL ports

should be no problem using them as AP's ( I got the Eircom one to do just that )

If the Netopia has an ethernet (network) WAN port and has firewall functionality then connect the WAN port to your wireless connection.

Otherwise
Turn OFF the DHCP server in the Netopia and let the wireless connection do it for you.

If the netopia only has one LAN port then you would need a switch.

Philbert

Hi Capt'n Midnight,

I would like to use them as Wireless Access Points on a LAN but they only have one dsl port (that the Rj45 phone line goes into) and 4 standard ethernet ports for connected devices.

So are you saying that I could simply connect one of these 4 ports to my existing LAN from which it would use this connection as the gateway connection? Because essentially I think thats what would have to happen.

Capt'n Midnight

yes

Foxwood

Philbert wrote:

I would like to use them as Wireless Access Points on a LAN but they only have one dsl port (that the Rj45 phone line goes into) and 4 standard ethernet ports for connected devices.

So are you saying that I could simply connect one of these 4 ports to my existing LAN from which it would use this connection as the gateway connection? Because essentially I think thats what would have to happen.

You can use them as Wireless access points, because all of the LAN ports, including the Wireless LAN ports are just switched - think of it as the traffic passing between the LAN ports but not passing "through" the router from it's LAN to it's WAN ports. Because the traffic won't be passing "through" the router, it isn't a "gateway". Traffic from a wireless node (say 192.168.1.27) will be passed directly to the any device that is plugged into any of the LAN ports, including a LAN port on a different router (192.168.1.1, for example) if that router is pugged into one of the Netopias LAN points.

Note that you still need a router of some sort - if your wireless broadband provides you with a public IP address (not a 192.168 address) then you can't "share" it. And if you try to use 2 Netopias, make sure tehy're not both trying to use the default 192.168.1.254 address. (Most other vendors use 192.168.x.1 as their default address, so they won't clash with the Netopia). And disable DHCP on the Netopias too - the "real" router should handle all that.
and (this is important) you change the Netopias address from 192.168.1.1 to something e

Philbert

Capt'n & Foxwood, great stuff guys thanks

Have them both working as wireless access points on my LAN. Would have never thought it possible but when you actually set it up its pretty obvious.

Cheers.