Hoping someone here can point me in the right direction, something a fair amount of Googling hasn't thus far.
I'm setting up a wireless network for a very small school with an unfortunately wall-heavy building. I've got two Netgear wireless routers plus a powerline ethernet extender. I want to have the two routers give coverage over the whole building, one at either end.
This mostly works; I set up the "main" one to do the DHCP, then the secondary to use the same network name and channel. I can walk from one end of the building to the other and apart from a short hiccup when my MBP switches from one network to the other, it works perfectly.
...except for a desktop machine located near the midpoint. It can see both routers when I do a site survey from it, one with decent signal strength, one with miserable. And it appears to be occasionally switching from the stronger to the weaker network at random, causing its connection to drop out since the signal is too weak until it randomly decides to switch back to the stronger one.
Is there some sort of configuration option I'm overlooking here that will prevent this from happening, or am I just asking too much of desktop/office grade wireless hardware? I'm sure if I were buying pro-level gear this wouldn't happen, but I don't have that kind of money to play around with, so I'm working with what I've got.
Oh, and for those wondering why no "blind" repeater, I've had HORRIBLE luck getting those to work properly. WDS is another option, but that still ends up running slowly, and since a decent wired extension with a single hop possible I didn't really want to add two more routers to cover the whole building.
I'm setting up a wireless network for a very small school with an unfortunately wall-heavy building. I've got two Netgear wireless routers plus a powerline ethernet extender. I want to have the two routers give coverage over the whole building, one at either end.
This mostly works; I set up the "main" one to do the DHCP, then the secondary to use the same network name and channel. I can walk from one end of the building to the other and apart from a short hiccup when my MBP switches from one network to the other, it works perfectly.
...except for a desktop machine located near the midpoint. It can see both routers when I do a site survey from it, one with decent signal strength, one with miserable. And it appears to be occasionally switching from the stronger to the weaker network at random, causing its connection to drop out since the signal is too weak until it randomly decides to switch back to the stronger one.
Is there some sort of configuration option I'm overlooking here that will prevent this from happening, or am I just asking too much of desktop/office grade wireless hardware? I'm sure if I were buying pro-level gear this wouldn't happen, but I don't have that kind of money to play around with, so I'm working with what I've got.
Oh, and for those wondering why no "blind" repeater, I've had HORRIBLE luck getting those to work properly. WDS is another option, but that still ends up running slowly, and since a decent wired extension with a single hop possible I didn't really want to add two more routers to cover the whole building.