Wired/Wireless Mixed Network

[HaierIT]

Good afternoon techs, I have a situation and need some direction. We have a wired network that assigns IP address via MS DHCP.

I am configuring a Access Point for wireless communication. I noticed that when I connect wired and wireless at the same time, DHCP will assign me two different ip addresses.

This is a waste of resources. I do not want to give my users 2 ip address to the same network. How can I avoid this?

Thank You in Advance.

 

[Noway2]

It sounds like you are using a wireless (router) access point and still want to use your wired network's services such as DHCP.

Normally, this is quite easy to do and you simply connect the wired feed into the LAN bridge of the wireless device. Make sure that the wireless device is not configured to act as a DHCP. You can still configure the wireless security as desired. This way the wireless devices will share the subnet with all the wired devices and they should see each other just fine.

 

[HaierIT]

Hi NoWay2, I am not understanding your answer. We have a HP MSM710 Controller, which manages the HP Access Point.

I do not want to assign each user two ip address. For example if I connect to the Access Point it will assign a address to my WIFI adapter, then if I go ahead and connect wired it will assign a different IP to my Ethernet card.

Everything is on the same network so no advantage of giving a user two ip address, it is just a waste of resources.

I would like to avoid this situation. Maybe you can clarify because I did not understand your previous statement. Again Thank you in advance.

 

[Noway2]

Ok, I understand what you are saying now. I thought you were saying that the wireless AP was issuing the IP and you wanted your (wired) DHCP server to do so. In other words, I thought you were wanting to combine a wired and wireless system and have them appear unified.

In your case, you are getting two seperate IP addresses, one for your wireless card and one for the wired card if the client has both devices connected. You want it to only assign 1 IP address to each client

To be honest, I really do not know if there is any way this can be accomplished, at least easily. The problem I see is that each client interface adapter, i.e. the wireless and wired NIC, needs to have an IP to be routable and distinguishable. If both devices had the same IP, there would be confusion with regards to which interface to send and receive packets.

It may be possible to use a form of trunking, where you combine multiple 'pipes' into one virtual pipe, but I don't know if that will do what you want.

If you are having a problem running out of IP addresses in your (wired) subnet, you could put the wireless interface on a different subnet and then either bridge them or NAT - route between the two.

 

[HaierIT]

Hey Noway2,Thanks for the feedback.

I think I am going to take a different direction after researching. This method is actually better because it provides a secure environment because prevents outside WIFI from becoming in contact with our internal network.

I am planning on having Windows automatically disable the WIFI card when something is plugged into the wired card. Once the wired connection is removed the WIFI card will re-enable.

I think this is the best solution. Solves my waste of resource issue and provides security that we definitely.
need.

I am in testing mode now of this setup.

Thanks again for your input.

 

[Noway2]

One suggestion if I may. If this is important to you, make sure that your critical applications handle the transition from being wired to wireless and back. For example, if someone has a laptop plugged into a docking station (wired) and undocks to go to a conference room, they will probably expect things to still work. Similarly when they redock, things should continue to work.

I state this because where I work, if you undock the PC and then redock it, about 50% of the time you get the blue screan of death and have to do a forced 5 second power down reboot to recover.