Well the wireless access point I ordered from eBay seems to have gone awry (they claim it was shipped on Monday - oh well) so today I went out to PC World and spent silly money on an exciting D-Link one. Stupidly I assumed that a wireless router could act as a wireless access point as a subset of its functionality.
How wrong I was.
I’ve spent a good few hours trying to get the thing to stop trying to be clever and route packets and just blindly bridge its wireless interface and 4-port switch. I’ve come to the conclusion I’m going to have to get this thing to do the actual routing on our network. This isn’t a terrible thing since it will do at least as good a job as our current Linux router (since it does, in fact, run Linux) but I can’t find a way of changing the IP range it routes for. It looks like the 192.168.0.0/16 subnet is hard-coded in. This is annoying since I use a 10.0.0.0/8 network at the moment with various /16 subnets for various VPNs I have.
This can all be worked around and probably needed tidying up but it doesn’t change the fact that all the IPs for the machines on our network are going to change which will probably break old, forgotten, years old scripts I no doubt have lurking ready to annoy me.
Update: Well I managed to get it to change the IP range it routes which is something. It turns out that (obviously) one has to enable ‘DNS relay’ which, according to the documentation, causes the router to DHCP itself an address. How stupid of me not to realise that :).
Update 2: Aside from NTL changing IP on me I think we’re there to first order. There are bound to be a few services missing though. Fun times ahead discovering what.