War and Peace in the Wonderful World of Wireless...

Not sure who’s reading that this might help, but what the heck…

At work, I have two separate wireless networks in adjacent buildings.  For seemingly no reason, reliability problems began popping up on both networks – intermittent client connections, inability for clients to obtain IP numbers via DHCP, the appearance of the router(s) not being able to route upstream…

I nearly replaced one of the access points, and then had a thought… since the (physically) adjacent networks used the same network numbering range (which is allowable), and since they shared the same WEP key (which is also allowable in theory), what if the networks were interfering with each other in some way.  BINGO!

Turns out both Linksys routers were using the same default WiFi channel, and with all that similar info between the networks, something was screwing up somewhere.  Changed the default channel on one of the networks and everything automagically seems to be working again.

A better solution for what I was originally trying to accomplish would have been to simply extend the initial network for additional geographic coverage.  Tried that, had trouble making one of the Linksys boxes act as a repeater, and then next thing you know the short term fix of  “just set up another network” turns into “your networks are screwed up”.  Easy to fix, good lesson to learn.