I am the one man IT dept. for a small church that I have been trying to slowly set their network in order. One of the many projects that I am working on is improving and securing our wireless internet access. I have been upgrading the WIFI network because we were using home quality routers as access points and the range / reliability was poor. I have a few devices that we want to have full network access, while allowing “open” access for internet usage (guest access). Because it is a small church, my budget / funding for the project is (like always) next to nothing.
I was able to acquire some, what seemed to be, decent access points (Engenius EAP-350) They are POE gigabit AP’s that boast the ability to host multiple SSID’s and to separate them using VLAN tagging. I then bought a POE / Managed switch (Linksys SRW2008P) just for the WIFI. Our current WIFI setup has been using Windows Server 2008 as a DHCP / DNS server with a Linksys router as gateway. Everything is working flawlessly except that all our guest devices are on the same network as everything else, which is what we want to change. I had read that the best way to separate the guest network, from the regular network, is to put them on separate subnets, but I have had some trouble making this happen.
I have no experience with VLANs, so I’m not sure if I’m missing something. I have the AP’s setup with 2 SSID’s each on their own VLAN, then to the switch. I then tried to use the router to send each VLAN to a different subnet so that my DHCP server can assign the correct IP address. For some reason I get only IP addresses from the main network. I then tried sending each VLAN to separate routers each setup on both subnets, but for some reason I still get my IP addresses from the main network and not the guest one. I then took an old Linksys router that I had lying around, flash it with DD-WRT, and using the built in wireless, I was able to set it up the way I want it, but as soon as I try to use my DHCP server and my access points, I have the same issue.
If anyone has any ideas to try, or experience in this area, I would greatly appreciate the input.
Thanks