Roaming

[wifihead]

Roaming from room to room and AP TO AP?? I have one router on DSL and 5 wired APs operating in a home. Each works great in the area served but with laptops walking around they do not associate without some rebooting etc. All are XP LTs and savy users.
How can I make roaming work better , faster or at all.

Thanks:(

[Uncle Ken]

Probably channel overlap, unless it's a really big home. Why so many access points?

[wifihead]

Good point but.. because the home is concrete, large, I used all the same equipment. SSIDs are the same. Channels 1.6.11.,2,5 spead out. All work great untill you try to computer-on move from area to area. Today we will try some tests to see if different settings in XP allow faster refresh and change some channels again. Thanks for the reply

[dot11guru]

That doesn't sound right at all. You should be able to associate to the new AP even if there is NOT overlapping coverage. In other words, even if your client adapter doesn't roam because it goes out of coverage, it should still associate to the next AP it happens to find if you've got the next AP on the same SSID.

Are you sure that all of your APs are configured with the same basic rates, SSIDs, and security settings?

Are they all run back to the same network segment or onto the same VLAN?

[wifihead]

Yes the vlan is the same and we are trying to move to another room. The adapter utility trys to hang on the original to point of out of range and dies. (page not found) .

I would like to suggest that a utility have a "re-associate" button on the toolbar without having to search, scan or move up.

I can appreciate the need to "hang on " to the link of original association but it has it's drawbacks. Cell phones have a special function to automatically do that so...... The mentality has been one AP per home and that is just not true in most places today.

Thanks for the comments and we are going to work this thru.

[dot11guru]

What utility are you talking about?

It it's some sort of Site Survey application, it may very well lock onto the BSSID of the AP it is associated to in an attempt to measure the size of the coverage area.

Do you have some sort of tool that tells you the BSSID of the AP that you are associated to?

Do you notice if that BSSID changes. You could actually be roaming to the new AP and the AP can't forward the packets to the server your connected to because your VLAN configuration is not correct.

If you're using WEP, and the WEP key in the 2nd AP is wrong, it may allow you to associate, but will not forward any of your packets because the decryption fails.