[Gllug] bridging ports on a 3com switch

[John Hearns]

On Thu, 28 Nov 2002, Xander D Harkness wrote:

> My brother who is still stuck at work trying to get a wireless link 
> going has run into a couple of difficulties.
> 
> He has four wireless arials two on either side of the divide.

Xander, a diagram would help here.

> 
> He is trying to bridge two ports on a 3com switch
 either side to allow 
Sorry, but smartness mode switches on here.
What a switch is is a mutli-port bridge.
Before switches were popularised by (argghh! I forget the company name)
ethernet was carried on shared coax cable, or by shared hubs.
Segments were divided by two-port devices called learning bridges.
Company XXX (arggh! I've used their kit) came up with the brillian idea
of using cheap ICs to create a 'hub' where each port was a bridge.
So no more huge collision rates when there is a lot of data transfer.


> all four arials to be used to double the bandwidth.


I am going to make an assumption here - what you want to do is to have
twice the wireless bandwidth.
In that case I think you need:
(a) to set the antennas to run on different wireless channels explicitly,
and make sure they are not on adjacent channels - I don't know how many
channels apart they should be, but this is easy to look up.

(b) you need ethernet channel bonding, not bridging.
A given switch may not necessarily do this.


I may of course be talking nonsense - if the configuration your brother 
has
is not what I've imagined.



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