AP IP and Mobile Units IPs

[Wu, Ben]

Martijn,

You are dead right. For the AP to transfer data across two dissimilar media
(mediums?), with different MAC types, it will need to be at least a bridge,
or it could be a router (or even a firewall if you wanted).

But yeah, an AP will most probably behave as a bridge between wired and
wireless. Some bridge designes can use the same MAC address on both
interfaces, some can do one MAC address each. It all depends on the
implementation. They both work.

Since my AP is also a NAT router, it can do both bridging and routing, and
you can configure it various ways (it's an Orinoco AP-1000).

The way I have it currently set up is it bridges ethernet and NAT routes 56K
dial-up PPP. The bridge in mine is a transparent bridge, so I see the MAC
addresses of stations on the other side (100BaseT-802.11b), which the bridge
is forwarding to me on this side, etc etc.

Regards
Ben Wu

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martijn van Oosterhout [mailto:kleptog at svana.org] 
> Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 9:25 AM
> To: JonesMB
> Cc: wireless at lists.samba.org
> Subject: Re: AP IP and Mobile Units IPs
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 02:50:23PM -0600, JonesMB wrote:
> > 
> > >Is there a way that allows me to know the IP address of 
> the AP that I 
> > >am
> > >connected to, iwconfig only has the MAC address!
> > 
> > using a combination of the information available from iwconfig and 
> > your ARP
> > table, you should be able to find the IP address that 
> corresponds to a 
> > particular MAC address.
> 
> I'm not sure if it is used at all, but if an AP were acting 
> like a bridge then there are two things to consider:
> 
> 1) The AP need not have an IP address at all
> 2) Machines on the other side of the AP would all have the 
> MAC address of
>    the AP in your ARP cache.
> 
> I'm not sure whether it actually works this way though.
> -- 
> Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog at svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/
> > Terrorists can only take my life. Only my government can take my 
> > freedom.
> 
>