[montie]

Hello,

Please bare with me this a a long post describing what I have and what I would like to do, I have scoured the forums + google extensivly looking for solutions and ideas, so please dont flame me if I dont have the knowlege I should - I am always willing to learn !

At the moment I have 5 old buffalo wla-54g's running as wds connecting 5 sites from my home to my various work places. For years it has worked fine, got a good boost when I flashed the firmware with dd-wrt, but now I am at a point where the traffic is perhaps a little too much for these old routers. I purchased a new buffalo whr-g125 and set it up as a spare. I was impressed how much faster the unit responds to commands. I am also aware that the equipment i am using is almost prehistoric.

I also have some old pc's which leads me to think I could replace the buffalo routers with these PC's.

First here is a bit of info what I have and what I think I shoudl do:

I have 2 adsl connections, which use routers that I cannot replace as they are isp locked and they are quite hot at catching 'unlockers'. These routers are physically in different buildings. I am happy enough with this.

At the moment my wds is set up so that one of the adsl links is the main gateway, the network happily shares out the conenction. The other adsl is set up with no dhcp etc and I set certain pc's ip settings to use this connection for the internet instead.

Only the routers talk to each other wirelessly so I dont worry about wifi clients - this is to change.

The external antennas and cabling I have were very expensive so I am keen to keep those. They are all 2.4ghz.

I realise I will need new pigtails as the buffalos all have a silly tiny connection whose name escapes me at the moment.

**

Ok I would like to set up a mesh network now, using OLSR and dd-wrt - the information about setting this up is a little disjointed but I think I understand the concepts quite well. The mesh could allow sharing the 2 adsl's giving some redundancy.

I would like to allow some clients to join the mesh - as far as I can see I need to add an olsr daemon to vista/xp to allow this.

Which PCI wifi card should I buy ? I am keen to try supperchannel, but perhaps this wont work if I want to have clients in the mesh other than the new x86 routers ? Or is there some sort of usb/pcmcia card with client software that would allow supper channel connection ?

I am not sure how I should deal with dhcp - at the moment one of the dd-wrt routers deals with this, what changes are needed to work with the mesh concept ?

I dont use a lot of the features, but perhaps it is time to look into more features.I am unsure if I should purchase dd-wrt software or donate and use a public one ? I am on a strict budget and the wireless link is a luxury rather than a requirement.

Thanks in advance.

Mark