Sharing a media library between two houses that have a wireless bridge?

gumbald · 10 Jul 2013 at 23:26

Not sure how to search for this anywhere else - simple enough question I hope: two houses, two net connections, but I want them to share (in the first instance) a NAS in one house over the wireless rather than going through the internet... Possible without crazy expensive equipment?

Before anyone suggests using some kind of sync over the Internet - I appreciate this is probably the 'easier' way of doing things - and most reliable in that there's a copy. However, one house has 0.5M upload with unlimited bandwidth and the other has 50M upload but limited bandwidth of 50G a month...!

I'm going to guess at a router at either end to put the NAS on a different subnet, but each house's router is still the default gateway? Security isn't the main concern with the separation, it's just making sure that each house uses its own connection rather than potentially unreliable wireless (that's another thing that will need investigating further down the line).

Hope that all makes sense?! When I get near a mouse, I'll draw a diagram.

bledd · 11 Jul 2013 at 01:05

Is laying a cat5e cable totally out of the question?

bremen1874 · 11 Jul 2013 at 01:06

The PC's gateway setting will decide which broadband connection is used, so there's no problem there.

The equipment required would depend on the distances involved and the throughput required.

!bluetonic! · 11 Jul 2013 at 07:45

You could make a virtual lan on house 'b's' router that is an extension of the wireless internet at house 'a'. Then any shares should be visible.

ci_newman · 11 Jul 2013 at 09:03

Reliability of the wireless connection will depend on the distances between the two houses. Using typical wireless-G/N and throughput speeds can suffer within the same household let alone crossing between borders.

Why not upgrade the two Internet connections to fast upload speeds AND no limits? Or string up a Cat5e cable.

gumbald · 17 Jul 2013 at 08:39

Whoops, I was longer away from the Internet than anticipated...

Is laying a cat5e cable totally out of the question?

Yeah, it's a residential street.

Reliability of the wireless connection will depend on the distances between the two houses. Using typical wireless-G/N and throughput speeds can suffer within the same household let alone crossing between borders.

It's about 50 yards, getting it working in theory would be the first thing, then I guess we can tweak the transport mechanism.

Why not upgrade the two Internet connections to fast upload speeds AND no limits?

It would cost me ~£30 extra a month. For the purposes needed, I figure that purpose built wireless equipment can be had cheaper.

You could make a virtual lan on house 'b's' router that is an extension of the wireless internet at house 'a'. Then any shares should be visible.

I thought VLANs would be the way to go - still want to protect against things like being able to access stuff other than in the VLAN, so if this is only one sided would there be access in one direction to other equipment?

spoffle · 17 Jul 2013 at 08:44

Buy a second NAS or re-purpose an old computer to act as one.

gumbald · 17 Jul 2013 at 10:48

spoffle said:
Buy a second NAS or re-purpose an old computer to act as one.

Ultimately, there's a NAS at each house that would like to be shared. The problem isn't the storage device, it's the connection means.

bremen1874 · 18 Jul 2013 at 00:18

Do you have direct line of sight?

If you're willing to spend £150ish you could get a ready prepared bridging kit that'd take most of the guess work out of the job.

parityboy · 19 Jul 2013 at 12:19

@bremen1874

I was going to suggest the same thing. You can get point to point antennae for this sort of job. Stick one on each roof/chimney, make sure you have line of sight, connect up at each end via switch/firewall/whatever and you're set.

anything I don't mind · 19 Jul 2013 at 15:55

Connect the nas to another wireless router with no internet configured on it. This will effectively make the nas connectable to anyone who connects to that wireless router. Then you can either use wireless to connect to the nas or what you could do is connect the nas with another network card to your main router or you could run a network cable from the nas router to your pc with another nic.

Basically plug the nas in to another wireless router on a different subnet with no internet configured on it. If its too far for wireless then buy two switches small 4 port netgear etc and some long cat5e cable and create separate network for the NAS boxes. Plug a wap in to each switch on either end and you can connect to the network that way. essentially a separate lan for it. (you could also replace the switches with 4 port wireless routers which will give you wap and switch in one. Just make sure you only have one dhcp server on that lan, whether it is at your side or the other side, makes no difference, just only one, or you could disable dhcp and set everything as static)