Wireless Networking(Setting up an AP-Client configuration)

Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) is becoming one of the most powerful tools of networking in the communication world.It uses waves which are in the microwave range of the elecctromagnetic spectrum.These are typical microwaves and as such,they get shielded by things like water,trees e.t.c or simply whatever material which gets hot in the microwave oven can interfere or disrupt the signals.There are basically four wireless modes of connecting these Wi-Fi devices.First,there is the Access Point mode ,then Client mode, the Ad-hoc mode and lastly the Passive mode.Looking at the AP-Client configuration in Macha,two wireless 'boxes' are used.Mostly these are Wireless-G Broadband access points WAP54G and the Wireless-G Broadband Routers WRT54G.These two boxes can be seen in the picture above.The front parts are coloured blue.These are the Linksys Broadband routers which can be looked at as three things in one box.That is there is the wireless access point , which lets you connect both streaming fast wireless-g(802-11g at 54mbps) and wireless-B(802-11b at 54mbps)devices to the network.There is also a built-in-4port-full-duplex 10/100 switch to connect your wired-Ethernet devices together.This means four PCs can be connected directly or one can attach more hubs and switches to create as big a network as may be required.Finally one can make the whole network share a high speed cable or DSL internet connection. To set up the AP-Client configuration,you need the two boxes and standard Cat-5 cables with Rj-45 connecters.The package come with the user guide on setup CD -ROM ON which all the instructions are properly documented.You first need to connect the broadband router ,confiure the PCs,and then configure the broadband router.You configure the PCs by giving them the appropriate IP addresses,subnets,gateway and the domain name server(DNS).To configure the routers,one has to be made the Access Point and connected to the WAN while the otherone is made the client.The AP is geteway between the WAN and the WLAN and thus it needs two ip addresses for each network.On the other side, the client is the gateway and also needs two ip addresses for each respective network.You can have one AP with several clients but it shouled be borne in mind that the more the clients the smaller the bandwidth.