@Deviouz1:

the problem is that as soon as I hook up the netgear, seemingly no matter how I try to configure it, it knocks the rest of my network offline.

A bit more information would help. For example, what do you mean by "knocks the rest of my network offline"? does that mean you don't get any response to a ping directed at www.google.com from the pfSense console? Does it mean you can't access the pfSense web GUI? etc etc. Details like When I do … on a system connected to ... I get response ... when I expected to see ... would be much more informative than the executive summary.

Perhaps you have duplicate IP addresses, perhaps you have multiple WiFi access points using the same WiFi channel, perhaps you had a panic when some part of the network didn't behave as expected and you overstated the problem.

@steve40:

I've tried several ranging from belkins, TP-link and asus and all have made the system crash when attempting to configure AP mode.

If I recall correctly I had this happen on pfSense 2.0.1 but not on pfSense 2.1 snapshot builds. I suggest you try a pfSense 2.1 snapshot build which has more "up to date" device drivers than the pfSense 2.0.x series.

You mean it depends on the router, and seeing how most consumer grade routers aren't advanced enough you don't think it's doable?

Right now pfSense does not handle any of the DHCP for the network.  It's all handled by the Windows servers.

Does anyone have an idea about what the Firewall rules would look like for this?

For Reference I have :

LAN

WAN1

WAN2

WAP

Where WAN1 and WAN2 are my (obviously) my two WAN connections and LAN is my LAN.  I would like to have all WAP traffic isolated from the LAN so that there's no possibility of accessing network resources through that connection.

Maybe im jumping the gun here, but what about dual band N900  (450 x 2 ; 2.4ghz and 5ghz) will there ever be support and pfSense work as an access point with same features as the new N900 routers?

I just bought a PCI to PCI-Express and a PCI-Express N900 dual band card (Atheros chipset, same as TP-Link, it's a Rosewill) and theoretically, PCI is 133MB, so it should be able to do the 450Mb/sec…but so far we will only see 54g speeds until...?

@Clear-Pixel:

The media center has always shown up in the ARP table … Maybe you have a clue as to whats going on?

Sorry, I don't. If it happens again a packet capture might be informative.

@Clear-Pixel:

Update ….. After a few minutes my android phone or the media center dropped the connection. It could be due to sleep mode on the Media Center, Lan is falling asleep?

I suspect that phones generally turn off WiFi when it seems inactive or the phone seems inactive (power saving measure). That sort of behaviour might limit their utility as remote controls.

Lets start with the basics:
1. What build of pfSense are you using? (It is reported on the home page of your pfSense box.)
2. Does your card have a supported chipset? Please post the output of pfSense shell command```
pciconf -l

There are guides in _http://doc.pfsense.org_. Have you read/watched any of them?

Solved. With this pci-e wireless card I couldn't establish contention. My PC runs windows 7 64 bit. So I uninstalled the tp-link drivers and I installed atheros, the chipset drivers, from atheros site. Everything works OK, so far!

pfSense builds include drivers for all supported NICs. You shouldn't need to do anything to install a NIC driver.

To configure the wireless router you need to know its IP address so you can work out how to connect to it.

If you want to apply access restrictions to WiFi clients (for example, preventing access to your wired computers) you will need to connect it to a separate interface in your pfSense box, ether through use of VLANs or by using a separate physical interface.

If you haven't already done so, you should read some of the pfSense tutorials and How-tos at http://doc.pfsense.org

this is not ac but after you set it up I bet this would work awesome as an access point for pfsense.

http://www.amazon.com/EA-N66-Ultra-Fast-Wireless-Repeater-High-Power/dp/B007ZT23ZE/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1366255114&sr=8-7&keywords=asus+ac+wireless

just have a 3rd nic and plug this in as an access point.

Thanks wallabybob, I was about to go crazy since I thought the it is supported but I couldn't make it work.

Sorry for double post, modify button has vanished. Problem solved: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,60995.msg328890.html#msg328890

@mrjb6x3:

i cant figure out hot to connect to the router i want to use so i need some advise on that issue

I presume the router is acting as an Access Point (AP) in which case you should configure the WAN interface Mode = Infrastruction and in the SSID box immediately below the Mode box enter the WiFi network name configured in the router.

@mrjb6x3:

and can i connect multiple wireless cards to diff networks

Yes, but you might need some cunning (for example, directional aerials) so the different cards aren't "shouting into each other ears" (you probably won't want the very strong signals from nearby transmitters swamping the much weaker signals from more distant transmitters).
.

@coyote:

manual connect through the blackberry? = yes did you try both the 2.4Ghz and 5? = my pfsense router or rather my stick support only 2.4GHz did you try setting G only in the router? = yes, you can select only between 11b and 11g

I also set my playbook with a static IP; that should at some routers help to a persistent connection: no chance.
Next, I want to try one or two different sticks with different chipsets. the techniclan usb stick was with rt2870 + rt3070. If that doesnt help, then I'll leave as it is, without wlan. I dont want a 3rd box for the internet.

Which router do you have now?

I see.. I have a Buffalo WZR-300HP2..I bought a couple of these..and they have been great..it comes with DDWRT in it..in fact I was just actually talking to an employee who affirms that opening applications that require SQL was faster under the old setup (Buffalo)..now I have everything here running on PFsense. At home my playbook didnt like the Buffalo but blackberry did an upgrade and it worked perfectly without having to tweak the settings..But going back to rt2870, I have had similar usb sticks before with Ralink and it is a hit and miss type of thing…I always have good luck with Atheros they just seem to work in my setups and actually buffalo is atheros at least on this one

On the pfSense Wifi interface add a firewall rule to allow access to the printer and to block access to the LAN. Firewall rules are processed top down until the first match.

Just because a card supports multiple bands doesn't mean it actually has multiple radios on it.

I've not had my hands on any cards that might actually have two radios so I'm not sure how they "look" to the OS. With VAPs, the channel must be identical for each entry, at least last I knew. There may be some work that improved that in cards that have multiple radios, but it wouldn't be supported in our GUI just yet.

@rekd0514:

I assume the SSID should be the name of the hotspot AP. Is that right?

In pfSense the wireless interface SSID should be the WiFi network name configured in the hotspot. This might not be the same as the name of the hotspot AP.

@rekd0514:

Also should the IP address assigned to the wireless interface be within my DHCP server range?

The pfSense interface type should be set to DHCP to get configuration information from the AP.