Multi-wireless router setup help needed

[bggowing]

Hi,

I'm working with a church that has a need for 3 wireless access points. One in the sanctuary, one in the office area, and one in the youth area. The current wireless routers are all Netgear WGR614v9 with the exception of the youth area which is getting set up and will also be a WGR614v9. The Sanctuary and Youth area routers need to be configured so that only internet access is available. The Office area one needs to be configured for internet and internal file access.

Currently the Sanctuary and Office routers are configured for internet and internal file access. This model router does not have a guest zone available. Is there a way to configure these routers in the Sanctuary and Youth areas to block internal file access but be open to internet traffic without resorting to DD-WRT? The current IP scheme is 192.168.1.1(office router), 192.168.1.99(sanctuary) and 192.168.1.199(youth router).

Or should I just have them take back the WGR614v9's for something that has guest zones available and save myself some headaches.

Thanks,
Brian

[bpalermini]

I think you can configure it with what you have.

For the office area you should setup the wireless unit as an access point. To do this you would connect to a LAN port, not the Wan port, and turn off DHCP. That way those users will get a IP address from the main router.

For the other two locations use the routers on the wireless units. Connect to the WAN port on the router, configure them up with fixed IP addresses, sub-net mask, gateway, etc. from your network and have them give out a different range (for example 192.168.50.xxx) of ip addresses.

You also should manually select channels for the three units, in the G band channels 1, 6 and 11 do not overlap. I'm not sure how N works but I'm sure someone else here will.

I've also done it the other way where we used multiple wireless routers in access point mode, set them all to the same SSID and key and made sure the channels didn't overlap and created a seamless network where you could move between areas of the church and not loose your connection.

[bggowing]

Thanks Bob. Right now the office router (192.168.1.1) is also acting as the main router. Can I leave it as such and set up the other 2 routers the way you suggested?

[bpalermini]

The best practice setup is a three (or in your case four) router setup with one (wired only) acting as the "core" and the others acting as the various zones, providing complete router services including DHCP.

That way the traffic from the unsecured network does not traverse the secure network as the switch in the core router, under normal circumstances, never connects the two networks together.

Many people however are comfortable with the "firewall" properties of NAT (network address translation) routers and would run it like you plan to.

There are many routers that can provide two networks. The Apple AirPort wireless routers publish two networks from one box. I'm not sure how they separate the traffic or they do more than put them on different subnets which is what you would be doing.

[bggowing]

Thanks Bob. Found out that the WGR614 routers that they are using aren't the V10 versions which has the Guest Access feature. Since they just bought the routers I'm going to suggest that they exchange them for the V10 models.