I'm about to move my place of living and my company HQ at the same time to a new location. It's a 2-story building with rather thick concrete walls, and when I tried to put my wifi router/access point there I could cover one room with decent quality signal, and in other rooms I barely could connect my laptop to the network.
I'd like to have a single network inside though, not several different ones, as it easies the stuff like sharing files and accessing other's computers without setting VPNs.
I was thinking maybe it would be an option to put an access point in each room, connect them all via ethernet cables to main router – but how could I then have the same network on all of them? Wouldn't it lead to some conflicts between different points in the network infrastructure?
What is, generally, advised solution in a situation like this?
Best Answer
Connect all the APs via Ethernet cables to a central switch, each AP on a port.
Connect the switch to the router via back-to-back Ethernet cable using one port only.
Assign default gateway ip address on the router port connected to switch, say 192.168.1.1/24.
Disable DHCP and/or NAT (if avaialable) on all APs.
Configure ip addresses on APS (if mandatory), E.g. 192.168.1.2-5/24 for 4 APs. You can use those IPs for managing the APs.
Run DHCP from the router (unless you have another DHCP Server), e.g. 192.168.1.10-50/24.
This will create a single network segment for all hosts connected to the APs (or Switch in general), and the default gateway will be the router.
Hosts on this segment will now talk to each other directly via the switch.
You can use same SSID for all APs, and you can set each to a different channel (1, 6 or 11) to minimize interference.
This is a basic setup, there are other possibilities, depending on requirements.