V-TEK Weblog about webdevelopment and linux

Extended/Bridged my wireless network without wires!

At home / my headquarter, my broadband modem is located in the front of the living room, and my office is right above that part of the living room. For printing, backup and several other features I wanted to extend my wireless network, without making holes in the ceiling nor the wall. So I decided to take a look around at the internet to see if this was possible. All the search results pointed at flashing my current Linksys WRT54GL to DD-WRT ( firmware with more options then the regular firmware ).

Ok, one thing was clear... I needed some other Linksys wireless router to extend from. But wait (!), my LaCie Ethernet Disk was also having problems so this was a good time to also replace that disk too and create a good setup for my backups!

After some searching at the websites of local computer stores I found the Linksys WRT54G2 to be my primary wireless router.For my Brother printer (HL-2030 series) I wanted USB printing support, for my Sony Playstation3 I needed an UPnP mediaserver, and for backup I wanted a NFS file server. I found all these features in the Synology DS-108j Diskstation (that comes with 1 disk bay, so no disks included by default). I also needed some storage for this diskstation, so I decided to spent my money on a Western Digital 500Gb SATA disk.

Alright, I went to the computer shop bought all the stuff I needed and then the fun part began. One of my wireless routers had to be the primary router and the other one needed to be configured as "client bridge". I decided to flash the best router of the two ( linksys wrt54gl ) to the dd-wrt software and to set this router up as the secondary router ( the client bridge ). Setting up this server is quit simple, as I followed the steps at http://dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Wireless_Bridge.

Ok, setting up the Synology diskstation was quit easy too, just insert the disk in the bay ( or consult the manual if you don't know how to do this ). Then boot a Windows machine ( oh my... where did I left Windows, everything is linux around here ), insert the cd-rom and start the Synology install process. The installation took about 10 minutes and after that I was very, very amazed with the nice features that this diskstation had! ( printing support, several webservices and even surveillance support, all in a beautifull ajax portal ).Now giving the diskstation a static ip as this seems the most logical for this kind of devices to me . ( and no, hostnames do not work for me since I don't have my local DNS ).

The printing support was even much easier and faster, just plugged USB cable the Brother printer in the Synology system and it was ready to serve as printer server.

As the last part the NFS server had to be setup. Therefore I used the default shared, which can be found at the "Shared Folders" option in the webinterface of the Synology Diskstation. Selecting a share by clicking on it, and after that clicking on 'NFS Privileges', the setup screen for NFS privileges came up. Simply filling in the network from where the share could be accessed was the only thing needed ( all other things are taken care of). Now for mounting the NFS share for example in Ubuntu, try the following commands:

# apt-get install nfs-common
( nfs support needs to be installed first!)

# sudo mkdir my_mountpoint

# sudo mount -o tcp -t nfs 192.168.1.111:/volume1/photo my_mountpoint
( mouning nfs over TCP using type NFS )

Ofcourse there is also a much more permanent way to store your NFS shared, but I'm not gonna explain that one ( the internet is full of it ) So take a look for permanent mounting here