The Case of the Home Network (Part 1)

When purchasing our current home several years ago, one of the requirements–besides having enough bedrooms– was the need for a home office for my wife.  She telecommutes, so a dedicated home office for her work was a requirement.  In addition, we would need a fast, stable home Internet connection.

The best option we had available at the time was Time Warner Cable.  We signed up for their 20Mb service, and I installed all the equipment.  The cable modem ended up in the basement on one end of the house.  My wife’s office ended up on the second floor on the opposite end.  That’s quite a run for the wifi when it has to pass through ceilings/floors with water pipes hidden in the walls.

This was compounded by the relatively weak wireless transmitter inside the cable modem.  The wireless-G cards I had weren’t able to get enough signal to make a reliable, fast connection as they should.  My solution was to re-appropriate Old Reliable:  A Linksys WRT54G router.

After upgrading the WRT54G to the latest DD-WRT firmware, I was able to have the router join the network with my wife’s work desktop plugged in to an ethernet port.  The added signal boost of the Linksys made for a stable connection that worked well enough.  This is how the home network was configured and run for several years.

With this setup, my house had decent enough 54G speeds.  However, as more new devices entered the house–most notable increasingly faster iPads and a couple upgrades worth of iPhones–I couldn’t take advantage.  It seemed clear, as a nerd, that something had to be done.

To fix this issue I acquired a pair of TP-LINK N600 routers.  Capable of N-class speeds, these devices were destined to upgrade my network and provide better coverage all over the house.  Instead what they wrought was a plethora of headaches as I tried to make everything talk to each other properly.

With the addition of the routers I was able to finally address the issue of a weak wifi signal.  Turning off the transmitter in Time Warner’s modem and replacing it with the much stronger antennas of the TP-LINK unit in the basement, as well as setting a second TP-LINK on the second floor, meant the signal was good and strong between both.  It was a better setup overall, but still not perfect.

One of the first things I did upon receiving the routers was to load a custom firmware on them.  As I mentioned, on my Linksys was DD-WRT, but in reading it seemed the consensus for the TP-LINKs was OpenWRT.  Having never used OpenWRT, I decided to give it a try.

The immediate issue I ran into was that out of the box, OpenWRT doesn’t have an option to act as a client bridge.  In this mode, the router joins the existing network as a client, and passes all of the network information (DHCP requests, network sharing protocols, etc.) on to the clients—in particular the clients connected to the router via the ethernet ports, as my wife’s work computer used.  Although her computer could connect to the Internet, the lack of a client bridge mode meant that it was isolated.  Things such as its printer couldn’t be shared, and any shares I had available on other devices were invisible to her computer.

There was another complicating factor in all of this tinkering and configuring of the wireless network:  My wife still had to work.  As part of her job she facilitates webinars, so her connection has to be stable.  I was essentially doing testing in production, and failure or instability was not an option.  For this reason, once I had her computer online with a good connection out to the wider world I was hesitant to mess with it.

The impetus to change things came a couple months ago when TWC sent me a letter.  In an effort to compete with newer Internet offerings from other companies they were upgrading all of their plans.  My current speed of 30Mb was about to jump to 200Mb!  As part of this upgrade we would be getting a new modem with dual antennas that promised to have a significantly stronger signal.  Once it was configured and connected this proved to be the case, with the wifi able to penetrate the rest of the house in every corner.

Solving that problem left me with another, more pleasant issue to deal with:  What to do with the TP-LINK router that served as the primary wifi transmitter for the cable modem?  I had an extra router that wasn’t necessarily needed anymore.

The first thing I decided to do with it was revisit the firmware.  In the time since I had first purchased the routers, a custom DD-WRT firmware was created for the TP-LINK (listed in the DD-WRT router database as a WDR3600).  Once I managed to get OpenWRT off, the original factory firmware back on, and then load DD-WRT, things began to fall into place.

With the router in client bridge mode once again, my wife’s desktop was was now able to see the wider network.  The printer was available, shares were visible, and the signal back down to the basement was strong and reliable.  The network was back in good order, as it should have been in the first place.

The final piece of this puzzle fell into place as I was browsing around NewEgg.  On a whim I looked at their desktop wireless cards, and lo and behold they had an open box, triple-antenna Rosewill wireless card for dirt cheap.  I decided to take a flier on it, and ordered.

With the addition of that card, the client bridged router in her office was no longer needed.  The desktop became just another client on the network, the printer was plugged in via USB, and then it was shared out to the rest of the house.  So now, I had two superfluous routers.  Which gave me the opportunity to soak the entire house in wifi…