Seemingly Random Cross Connection Problems on Wireless Repeated Network

[BlackAndChrome]

Hello All,

I recently reconfigured my home network. We run a small business in one of our outbuildings that is about 500ft away from our home so the goal was to connect the devices in that building to the same subnet as our home network for easiest interconnections.

The Physical Setup:
To do so I am using a WHR-HP-G300N running DD-WRT as a repeater bridge in the outbuilding and a WHR-HP-G54 DD-WRT as a AP in our home. The repeater has a yagi antenna pointed at the AP and big TP-Link omni for local connections. The AP has a panel antenna pointed towards the yagi and internal antenna for local connections. Connection strength between the two is 40% and held strong even before I adjusted the antennas (20%).

Bridge (outbuilding) connections
PC W7 (LAN)
Time Clock (LAN)
2x IP Cam (WLAN)
Cell Phone (WLAN)

AP (home) Connections:
Modem (WAN)
PC 1 W7 (LAN)
PC 2 W7 (WLAN)
PC 3 W8 (WLAN)
Laptop (WLAN)
Cell Phone (WLAN)

The Problem:
Although all devices on the bridge side have internet and access to all other bridge side devices I can not connect to or from CERTAIN devices on the AP side. For example

ping from bridge PC to AP PC1 pass 100% all day any day (WLAN PC)
Other direction pass

ping from bridge PC to AP PC2 OR PC 3 90% fail 10% high latency
Other direction fail

At this point I thought that the AP router was not bridging the LAN/WLAN ports because the LAN computers could connect but the WLAN could not. But then i started to get the random successful pings and figured that was not the problem. Plus I did the following...

ping from bridge PC to AP Laptop OR Phone pass all day any day
Other direction pass

Firewall on both routers is off, I tried turning off the firewall and antivirus on one of the problem computers and it did not solve the problem

I have dismissed bad connection since everything works so well on some computers and did so even before the antenna adjust.

So what could be causing high latency and random disconnects between the 2?

Would be very grateful for any advice on a direction to troubleshoot or a simple solution. Pay day is in 2 days and I need to get time clock access on PC2, which we run quickbooks on.


Thanks,
-Nick

 

[AdvHomeServer]

This is only a wild guess, but the panel antenna might be an issue since it is less directional than the yagi.

See if everything is on the same subnet.

Personally, I find it almost impossible to mentally picture the actual layouts from narrative topological descriptions. Not just you. Everyone who does this (including me in the past) asks the reader to do a lot to decipher it.

Re payroll: as a CPA and tech enthusiast, I strongly recommend you have backup systems in place for vital business functions, such as payroll. In your case, I would suggest moving it to a separate PC that doesn't depend on the network and have usb drive backup for data; or something that accomplishes the same end result. Your unpaid employees will offer less sympathy than the posters here.

 

[azazel1024]

Quick off the cuff, don't use a router as both a bridge and an access point at the same time. The only time to consider breaking that rule is if you are using one discrete band as the wireless bridge (say, 2.4GHz) and the other band for local clients (say, 5GHz). Also, only if you have seperate antennas for each radio. This of course takes a concurrent dual band router.

The only time to possibly break rule this is if you have one end point (or both) where they are in range of omni directional antennas on the router/AP. Still, you really don't want to be bridging and running an AP on the same band from the same router.

You deffinitely don't want to mix high gain and omni antennas on one router. That often leads to bad things. Just don't ever.

Best bet is two dedicated bridges, or two AP/routers in bridge mode dedicated to the wireless bridge, and then setup a seperate router (or access point) at each end point to act as a wireless access point.