[Bloat] Advice for dual wifi home network

[David Lang]

On Thu, 7 Mar 2013, Dave Taht wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 7:09 PM, David Lang <david at lang.hm> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 7 Mar 2013, Dave Taht wrote:
>>
>>  On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 6:36 PM, Jonathan Morton <chromatix99 at gmail.com
>>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> On 8 Mar, 2013, at 1:22 am, Sandy McArthur wrote:
>>>>
>>>>  I'm looking to setup a home network with two APs connected by ethernet.
>>>>>
>>>>  I think I understand the default network settings for use as a single
>>>> cerowrt network but I'm struggling how to wrap my brain around how a
>>>> second
>>>> router should be configured so that the second access point isn't just
>>>> another level of NAT deeper inside the first router.
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Internet ---- cerowrt A ---- cerowrt B
>>>>>
>>>>> Configuring the B router is what is confusing me.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> You will need four devices, if your modem is not itself a router:
>>>>
>>>> Modem  -----  Router (does NAT)
>>>>               |    |
>>>>              AP    AP   (both in bridge mode)
>>>>
>>>>  - Jonathan Morton
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Bridging bad idea in modern age. Routing good. Just the two cero devices
>>> he
>>> has is fine.,
>>>
>>
>> Bridging is bad, but bridging with the ability to move from AP to AP can
>> be far better than two routers and the user has to manually disconnect from
>> one (breaking all existing connections) and attach to the other.
>>
>
> Depends on signal strength. I'd rather reconnect to wifi box "upstairs",
> clearly marked as such, when upstairs. I'd rather my wifi boxes live on
> different channels, so devices in each part of the house get more
> bandwidth, less errors/retries and lower latency.

the two routers should absolutly be on different channels.

As for manually connecting to a particular AP vs just 'any AP on this band' 
(because it is _very_ useful to seperate the 2.4G and 5G bands), an expert 
paying attention can get a slight advantage from manually connecting to the 
right one, but in practice, people are not going to bother to switch until the 
connection becomes unusable (and some may not even do so then). This causes many 
retranmissions, and higher power levels which interfere with other users.

> In the case of persistent connections these days I mostly use
> mosh.mit.eduinstead of ssh, and mosh survives moving from any network
> to any network
> and even suspend/resume. That was my main use of persistent connections,
> admittedly.

having to abort and restart a video stream because you moved out of range of one 
router and so you now will have a different IP address is a bad thing for 
example.

> That's me.
>
> Now, cero's preference for routing over bridging comes from the science
> part, in that it was impossible to analyze the behavior of bridged
> wifi/wired networks when we started, so we broke apart the 2.4 ghz, 5.xghz
> and ethernet networks started exploring what it would take to make routing
> easier and better.
>
> Along the way, for example, babel gained authentication.
>
> It certainly is possible to bridge or only partially bridge cero, it's just
> more complex than routing it, presently.
>
> Secondly, and I know I'm weird, I still generally use ahcp and babel on my
> laptops and thus regain the ability to move from AP to AP, as well as act
> as a mesh node for such, as well as move from ethernet to wireless and
> back, transparently, without dropping connections.
>
> That's a bit of bleeding edge technology that few have tried... and has
> become harder and harder to use on unhackable android devices, in
> particular.

The question is "is this network only supposed to be able to support people 
running these bleeding edge technologies, or is it supposed to support all 
applications?"

for most people, they need to support existing applications and do not have the 
option of changing the protocols in use, so for many people, bridging works best 
when you have multiple APs.

Now, one thing I did not get into earlier, when you have multiple APs and bridge 
them, they should be getting bridged onto a dedicated 'wifi' wired network that 
is then routed to your wired device. You do not want to have your wired 
chit-chat and broadcast traffic bleeding over to your wifi network.

David Lang