General Questions

[wired devices at two separate locations]

I just redesigned my network to support wired devices at two separate locations. (See attached picture.)

I'm running m0n0wall on a ALIX 2d3 board as router and DHCP server. One port is assigned as WAN and is hooked up to my internet connection, the other two ports are bridged.

One of the bridged ports are connected to an airport extreme which is running in bridge mode. I have some wired devices attached to the AirPort Extreme and some devices using the WiFi distributed by the AirportExtreme. This end of the network is running fine and working just as expected.

The problem is the other end which is connected to a 8 port gigabit switch, which in turn is connected to an airport express, also configured as a bridge.

Even though I do get internet access from wired devices connected to the switch the airport express WiFi does not provide internet access as expected. It does give WiFi clients the correct IP (assigned by the m0n0wall DHCP server) But half the time there is no internet access via WiFi. What I mean by half the time is that sometimes it starts working only to fail again if you disconnect from the WiFi and the connect again.

I'm trying to figure out what I've missed. All devices are connected using straight cables. Might it be some kind of race condition between the AirPort Express and the wired device attached to the switch?

Could using the other WiFi (the one distributed by the airport extreme) pollute the MAC tables in some way, making the connected computer temporarily unable to access the DNS/monowall server?

Should the Airport be connected to the switch using a crossover cable?



Update::

When I got home today I did some more testing and now everything is working great all of a sudden. No changes to the setup of either of the devices. Perhaps some routing info from before the network setup change was causing the problem. Everything is working as expected now.