Finally, I can start playing with wireless network at home 
In our new house in Bintaro, we got 1-year package of Telkom Speedy connection as part of the house purchase. After waiting for 3 months, finally Speedy reached our house 2 weeks ago. Bintaro Jaya already provided the ADSL modem, but the plain standard one, which is TP-LINK TD-8817 that only provides 1 Ethernet connection without any wireless. So, I start hunting for wireless router.
After a (quite long) discussion with my company’s IT team, I decided to use Linksys WRT320N. There are a few reasons that I need to explain here:
- Why not a combined Wireless Router + ADSL Modem? yes, the setup will be much easier with only 1 device. However:
- If I don’t use Speedy anymore, I need to replace the entire device. Meanwhile, if I separate the wireless router from the modem, if I need to change my connection to some other provider, I just need to change the modem and keep the wireless router.
- With the same price, if I buy an ADSL modem with Wireless router, I will only get Wireless-G, which is quite old now.
- Why Wireless-N? This is a technology reason, to use the latest one. Not all device support this, but all new device already supports N. So, we’d better buy N devices from now on. BTW, WRT320N uses Wireless-N 2.0.
- Why Gigabit? This is also a technology choice. Almost all Ethernet now support Gigabit. Also, Wireless-N can deliver 300Mbps which is way out of Ethernet 100Mbps. And if you want to play with video and audio between devices (later on), you’d better use a combination of Wireless-N and Gigabit.
- Why Linksys? Maybe this is more of brand confidence. We have a lot more other choices, like TP-LINK, D-LINK, Belkin, etc. But it seems that Linksys already got the recognition in networking area, plus the fact that the brand now part of the great Cisco brand. And of course, the device is really really beautiful
Now, having 2 routers (ADSL modem and Wireless), the connection will be a bit complicated. To those that understand networking, you can immediately see the problem. The first router, the ADSL modem will have Public IP in the uplink port and Private IP (default to 192.168.1.x) in the downlink port. The second router, the Wireless router, will have its uplink port using Private IP in the same network as the ADSL modem, and the downlink port using Private IP too (look at diagram).
Now, we have 2 choices, the easy way, or the hard way.
The easy way, the Wireless router uses Private IP from a different network, like, 192.168.2.x. So, we need to set the uplink port IP to 192.168.1.2 (to follow ADSL modem’s network) and the downlink port to 192.168.2.1. Done (look at diagram).
The hard way, we can force the Wireless router to use the same Private IP as the ADSL modem. For example, the uplink port we put 192.168.1.2 and the downlink port 192.168.1.3 and all other devices uses DHCP above 192.168.1.4. We can achieve this by doing a bit of “acrobatic” routing table. Can be done, but very prone to errors (look at diagram).
When opening up the WRT320N box, I found out that Linksys uses some kind of Wizard to help us setup the network. I’m curious of the Wizard’s capability, so I tried the Wizard first. You need to remember, that by default Linksys expect Public IP in the uplink port and Private IP in the network 192.168.1.x (same as ADSL modem) in the downlink port. I want to see how the Wizard can detect this issue and solve it.
So, I follow the Quick Installation Guide up to the letters
First, I take out all the Linksys items from the box. Don’t use the cables or power first, just take out the Wireless router, Ethernet cable (blue color) and power adaptor.
Second, put the CD in the computer and run the Setup Wizard. After going thru the Welcome and Disclaimer screens, Linksys tried to detect existing networks. This is the point that I realized that I just made a big mistake: I haven’t connected the computer to the ADSL modem So, I abort the Wizard, connect the ADSL modem (thru Ethernet) and restart the Wizard. It quickly detect that I have a connection to a router and asked, do I want to replace the router, or use both router. I choose the last option.
Third, following the Wizard, I unplug the Ethernet cable from the ADSL modem and plug it to the Linksys’ Ethernet port.
Fourth, still following the Wizard, I use the Ethernet cable from Linksys (blue color), plug it to the Internet port (yellow color) in Linksys and plug it to the ADSL modem.
Fifth, still following the Wizard, I put the power adaptor on. The Wizard immediately run the setup. I was stopped here because of an internal error, and got a bit of panic: maybe it failed to setup this 2 routers setup. I restarted the whole thing from the beginning (also unplugging everything from Linksys and plugging the ADSL modem back) and finally passed the fifth step.
Sixth, the Wizard ask me to change the admin password for the Linksys. This is a mandatory step, since a lot of people now tries to find open wireless networks and access the router using the default password.
Seventh, the Wizard ask me to change the SSID from the default “linksys”. This is not the most important thing, but need to be done, so that (1) the network will be unique and can’t be mistaken with your neighbor’s; and (2) to hide a bit the fact that we are using Linksys device
Eighth, the Wizard ask me to choose the wireless Security that I want to use. I choose the highest, WPA/WPA2, because all new devices can support this protocol. It also ask for the passphrase. Choose an easy to remember passphrase, but should not be easy to guess. The passphrase can be up to 63 characters, so you can use something like “iloveyou” or other easy to remember phrase but not easily guessed.
Done. What an easy steps. After I checked, the Wizard has setup the wireless router to use 192.168.0.x as the downlink. Since I need to leave home in a hurry, I don’t have the time to observe the global network settings for each point. I’ll update later on.
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