office to store Wds nightmare

Guizemen · Apr 2, 2014

Hey guys, hoping you could maybe shine some light on an issue that's a tad unique, judging on internet searches.

Client wants to wirelessly bridge his flagship retail store to his office with a line of sight wireless bridge. Each location has its own discrete WAN connections, and are CURRENTLY connected via VPN, but when he tries to pull large reports, the retail system crashes due to their poor T1 connection speeds (which are still the best in the area, but inadequate). The wireless bridge is meant to alleviate that.

We've got the two bridges up and connected (engenius enh500, two of them), and linked. But getting the two networks talking is proving to be difficult. We tried setting the subnets (192.168.50.xx for the office LAN and 192.168.10.xx for the store) for each LAN as a subnet in the routers (RV082 at each location), but that caused nightmares where gateways were getting crossed, and some computers at the office were using the WAN at the store.

We're attempting to solve the issue without additional Hardware, but will if necessary. Anyone have any ideas?

abailey · Apr 2, 2014

Are you using static routes on your RV082's or a routing protocol?

bill001g · Apr 2, 2014

It is not going to be a simple fix. You have the 2 networks overlapping and both routers offering DHCP to all the machines. You get random results in that configuration.

Option 1
Run one location completely static and only leave DHCP at the other location. You will need to run a single subnet for all the machine. On the one that is static you need to set the IP address of the machine and set their gateways to point to the local router. A little tedious to setup but simple in concept.

Option 2
Route the networks together. How exactly you do this will depend on what features your routers have. If you can load dd-wrt on one or more it will give you the most flexibility. One good thing is the engenius devices are pretty flexible in how they run so may be able to make them run as routers. In any case you need a actual router not a nat device. To make this work with dd-wrt routers you would assign a second LAN network port to one of the routers. Say it has 192.168.10.1 for its normal lan, you would assign say 192.168.50.99 to it second lan. Because it now has 2 networks when the users send traffic to 192.168.10.1 that is destined for 192.168.50.xx it would now know how to get there. You still have to fix the return back from the 192.168.50.x network. You could either put a route in the 192.168.50.1 router saying 192.168.10.x is behind 192.168.50.99 or you could put it in the end users machine themselves. In either case you would cable your bridge units between the new "lan"port on one router to any lan port on the other. The only other way to do this is to run the engenius units a routers and let them nat the traffic but I suspect you will get port forwarding issues. There might be other ways, some routers support routing protocols like rip without dd-wrt but it would still be tricky to get this to work

abailey · Apr 2, 2014

bill001g :

It is not going to be a simple fix.

Option 2
Route the networks together. How exactly you do this will depend on what features your routers have. If you can load dd-wrt on one or more it will give you the most flexibility. One good thing is the engenius devices are pretty flexible in how they run so may be able to make them run as routers. In any case you need a actual router not a nat device. To make this work with dd-wrt routers you would assign a second LAN network port to one of the routers. Say it has 192.168.10.1 for its normal lan, you would assign say 192.168.50.99 to it second lan. Because it now has 2 networks when the users send traffic to 192.168.10.1 that is destined for 192.168.50.xx it would now know how to get there. You still have to fix the return back from the 192.168.50.x network. You could either put a route in the 192.168.50.1 router saying 192.168.10.x is behind 192.168.50.99 or you could put it in the end users machine themselves. In either case you would cable your bridge units between the new "lan"port on one router to any lan port on the other. The only other way to do this is to run the engenius units a routers and let them nat the traffic but I suspect you will get port forwarding issues. There might be other ways, some routers support routing protocols like rip without dd-wrt but it would still be tricky to get this to work

I believe the Cisco RV082's can do this, either by using one of the 2 WAN ports on each device and hook them to the AP's, or if you are not able to turn the firewall off on the WAN ports individually, I believe each interface on the built in switch can be assigned a VLAN. Not 100% sure though.

Guizemen · Apr 3, 2014

bill001g :

Haha, yeah, we had that experience already. Store computers were using the Office gateway and vice versa. Attempting to log into either RV082 usually got us the opposite one, but would sometimes switch back for no good reason.

Option 1 MAY be an option that would be viable, but far from ideal. This may have to be our pocket strategy.

As for Option 2, I do not believe the RV082 can run DD-WRT based on my research, and even if it did, I know that dual-wan support in DD-WRT isn't the best out there, and one of the major reasons for choosing the RV082s for this deployment was their reliability and dual-wan performance. Each location has a T1 and DSL line (We're in a part of the city where not even cable providers offer access to commercial services).
That being said, we're going to try to use the flexibility of the RV082's firmware to see what we can do, because I'm not entirely sure that putting the EnGenius devices into router mode would allow them to continue to serve their purpose (which is to be a wireless bridge between the two physical buildings). But we're definitely going to have to play with that idea to get them working, though.

Thank you for your response and thoughts

Guizemen · Apr 3, 2014

abailey :

Unfortunately, both WAN ports are already taken on each RV082 for a DSL and a T1 connection.
And yes, each port on the switching portion can be assigned a VLAN. Would this, combined with a static route using the IP of the "local" (wired in each respective case) EnGenius be a possible solution?

Or would there have to be a router between the RV082 and the EnGenius to act as a gateway? (Since I do not believe that the EnGenius can be a router, and still function as a WDS bridge)

abailey · Apr 3, 2014

Guizemen :

Unfortunately after looking at the documentation on the RV082 it appears that the built in switch is a layer 2 switch and not layer 3. Since that is the case you would need the router to support virtual interfaces but it does not look like it has that capability. So it looks like you will need a router between the RV082 and EnGenius on each end or possibly run the EnGenius in router mode. I do not know anything about EnGenius products, but from an earlier post it seems they may be able to run in some type of router mode.

Guizemen · Apr 3, 2014

abailey :

Sounds reasonable. We're going to have to look into adding additional hardware then, it would seem, if the EnGenius devices cannot do WDS as well as act as a router.

Thank you for your response and thoughts

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