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I am currently setting up a SOHO network with mixed wired and wireless clients using a consumer-grade 100Mbit/802.11g router. I've found that wireless clients are "invisible" (pings never returned, nmap finds nothing) from wired clients, but as soon as I establish a connection from the wireless client to the wired one, the wireless client becomes visible. To be a little more succinct:

[wired ~]$ ssh jill@wireless (no host available)

[wireless ~]$ ping wired (success)

[wired ~]$ ssh jill@wireless (success?!)

I've tried multiple wireless clients (Windows and Linux based) and they all exhibit this issue. Does anyone recognize this issue? What could be the possible causes of this?

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Are you using IPs or DNS/NetBIOS in your testing? – gravyface Sep 30 '11 at 10:58
IP. Sorry to give a deceptive example. – thecodes Sep 30 '11 at 11:09
What router is this? Sadly, many consumer grade routers (cheifly Netgear routers) use broken software bridging between their wireless and wired ports. There may be configuration options that will help. It could also be that the wireless clients are shutting off their interface when they're not using them to save power. – David Schwartz Sep 30 '11 at 11:18
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sounds like ARP suppression on the wireless router. Is there any "isolation" or "wireless DMZ" feature enabled? – gravyface Sep 30 '11 at 11:19
It is indeed a Netgear router... There is no mention of wireless DMZ or isolation in the manual or web interface. I have gone through the router settings quite thoroughly in attempt to sort this out. Currently it's a very simple setup with static IP assignments and no real distinction between wired and wireless clients that I can see. No suspicious messages in the log file either. – thecodes Sep 30 '11 at 11:31
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migrated from serverfault.com Sep 30 '11 at 16:57

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