Here is the situation, I live on the opposite side of the street (20m) to my best mate and we are looking at creating a network so we can distribute media files to each other, offsite backup would be a nice bonus.
I just dont know the best way to tackle this situation. ie cost vs benefit.
(have thought about feeding a cable through the water mains!)
*We both have telstra cable and voip setups and both have wireless networks (but not WDS to join them)
*dont really want to share internet but whatever works

what is the easiest way to join them?
all ive come up with is a secondary network via two WDS compatible wireless routers, but can this be configured to give us access to both each other's networks and also our own net?

Help! anything is appreciated!

At those kind of distances it should be pretty easy to attach a Meraki mini to each router and create a mesh network. It'd be a pretty cheap experiment they're only USD$49 and would easily sell on eBay if you didn't find it suitable.

I'd say go wireless, with a cheapo access point and a wireless to ethernet adapter or just a router box,
Either way make sure you mount the antennae high or in your roof cavity to prevent busses and trucks or cars blocking the signal, even if you live on a quiet street.

That looks pretty cool

thanks guys,
im looking at the meraki now, it does look interesting!
might start pimping out some internet to the neighbourhood!

I would get some access points with WDS that have removable antennas, and get some directional antennas from eBay or somewhere (can't you make them out of pringles tubes?), and set them up somewhere fixed, and away from potential disturbances (like Linux_insidev2 suggested).

Yeah, my friends and I have been considering setting up a mesh network with them for a while. We all live well outside the 250m range so would need to do some kind of cantenna mod, which we've been just to lazy to sort out.

ta,
say i link up the two networks how is it going to work with ip adresses and such? will we need to have one device assign ip addresses (DHCP) and can we both use our own internet connections and still access each others networks? it's baffling for me trying to work out the easiest way

Will you want to retain your own internet connections? (that would probably be best in terms of avoiding potential conflict and preventing issues if one of you has to move or something)

Or will one of you get the broadband, and have the other one leach off that?

Check out Meraki's plan for free wireless in San Francisco at sf.meraki.net.

Maybe we could persuade them to come to Oz?

yeah we want our own internet, more to avoid the pain of slow net when either is using bittorrent. have thought of splitting cost of a better plain but this isn't ideal

Yes you CAN!

See here for info on how to build you own cantenna. Or googlesmack cantenna for loads of other options.

We built a cantena for our college library and it works a treat!

2 x Access Points and some decent antenna's mounted on your roof will be fine. A collegue does this to get a network going between his shop and house which on about 200metres away.

as to the IP's, if you both get the same range (say, 10.0.0.x) and you make your Router .1 and his .254, you can both have seperate Gateway addresses to use your own broadband but still share files by access each others IP's.


Steve

cool, thanks, i think that is exactly what i wanted
so I take it assigning ips to everything in the network manually rather than have one router assign ips would be better in case either of us switched off the DHCP router,
if we just set gateways to our own routers like you said all should be good,

just need to find some cheapish access points that support WDS (this is necessary to join 2 wireless networks isnt it?)

thanks

I was planning to setup a small embedded network appliance in my home network and found the site that I have linked to below. I never found the time to set something like this equipment up and just ended up using a vanilla linux PC. You may find some inspiration for a home-grown, diy wireless setup here:

http://www.yawarra.com.au/wf-intro.php

They have some stuff that looks good for an outdoor application:

http://www.yawarra.com.au/hw-wrapoutdoor.php

Also have a look at their case studies:

http://www.yawarra.com.au/casestudies.php