Cisco 1900 series router configuration project

[xartin]

Taking on challenges far above my pay grade is always entertaining and who can argue with a boss that's willing to buy $3000.00 worth of hardware for me to experiment with and setup for production

Today's mission? setup and configure a brand new Cisco 1941w router with the wireless access point working in 2.4ghz mode with wpa2 security using the existing configuration from a very old cisco 1701 as a network services template.



Completing this is likely a tall order for a day given my level of familiarity with the new 1941w however i have configured a cisco 871w for production several years ago.

The key difference between Cisco routers that have a wireless radio is that ip addresses cannot be directly assigned to the physical ethernet ports which requires some effort creating "virtual interface groups" to assign ip addresses to for routing network traffic. This can be a challenging concept for anyone that's become accustomed to working with pure bare metal hardware like an ethernet card in a desktop pc.

Additionally both the physical interfaces and the wireless interfaces are both individual routers meaning both have to be configured independently as two separate routers which must be configured to communicate all traffic from both the lan gigabit nic and the 2.4 ghz wireless access point. this model also has a dual band wifi radio meaning it will do both the more common 2.4ghz and 5ghz radio spectrum. This router does have a java based web config assistant which is moderately useful but far less flexible than using the time honored CLI console config method.

challenges do lie ahead as there's not many existing configuration templates available online to use for reference due to this device being a very new cisco platform. This related cisco forums post has however been very helpful so far. Setting this up however is akin to configuring two advanced level routers and one switch in one square foot lol.

https://supportforums.cisco.com/message/3148027

Router(config-if)#ip address 10.123.100.1 255.255.255.0
% IP addresses may not be configured on L2 links Wlan-GigabitEthernet0/0.

Router>en
Router#sh ip int bri
Interface                  IP-Address      OK? Method Status                Protocol
Wlan-GigabitEthernet0/0    unassigned      YES unset  up                    up
GigabitEthernet0/0         unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
wlan-ap0                   unassigned      YES NVRAM  up                    up
GigabitEthernet0/1         unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
FastEthernet0/0/0          unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Vlan1                      192.168.0.60    YES manual up                    up

^ interface listing

Secondary mission must be that the third fast ethernet wic card and the gigabit wlan external must do Hot Standby Router Protocol failover with dual internet connections on the same router.

Hot Standby Router Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Since the client's main connection is a high speed synchronous satellite connection if that connection fails for whatever reason or bandwidth congestion is detected traffic would be routed over the secondary connection with is a business cable modem package which has far less upload bandwidth compared to the satellite line.

I'm aiming to get this into the configuration at a later date as the cable connection has not been functional for some time due to a possible cable break on the isp side.