Wireless Router Configuration - Real World Scenario

A friend of mine asked me to help set-up their wireless router for them. I soon found out it was going to be more than just a normal wireless set-up configuration when I discovered it had been configured previously and locked down.

The set-up as I found it consisted of:

• ADSL wired router with built-in switch, DHCP server (functioning correctly)
  
• Wireless router with built-in switch, DHCP server, Firewall etc (locked out and secured, no passwords or WEP keys)
  
• Some RJ45 network cables
• An AOL broadband ASDL account
• No hardware manuals

Before I could even begin to configure the wireless system I first had to find out how to unlock the router. Since I didn't have the manual I had to track one down. Thanks to Google and the manufacturers name and product code this was fairly easy.

Most reputable hardware manufacturers' have all the manuals and drivers of their hardware on their own website, if you have no luck with this method a search for the product or product code normally provides unofficial sites which contain the info you're after.

I found the manufacturer's website and located the customer support section. After selecting several fields to narrow my search I found the manual for the router.



The router (A Sitecom model) has a reset switch on the back, which when pressed while the machine is turned on reboots the machine, but if you hold the reset switch down while starting the machine up it resets the routers configuration to the factory settings.

Once this was reset I was able to browse to the routers config using a web browser pointed to 192.168.0.1.

Now the next thing I had to sort out is which box was going to be the DHCP server. Since this isn't your average wireless set-up it required a little more thought than normal. The system was working perfectly through the wired ASDL router and this was using DHCP, so it made sense to disable DHCP on the wireless router and let the wired router provide this service.

I logged into the router and ran the set-up wizard, I skipped the ASDL screen since the wired router was providing this service. After the config, which assumed I wanted it to be a DHCP server too, I had to find the option in another menu and turn it off.

The next issue was the IP address of the machine. This is normally set by the ISP when ADSL connects, however the wired router is performing that task in this scenario, so I had to set a manual IP address for the machine, which had to be outside the DHCP range of the wired router.

The last setting I had to make was the default gateway, this had to point to the IP address of the wired router.

Having completed the configuration and tested it, I went on to enable 128bit WEP security, lock the router configuration menu with a username and password, and disable SSID broadcasting.