[SlugBug] wireless 802.11 PCI cards

[Alan Dawson]

Quoting Bruno Postle <bruno at postle.net>:


> What are my options?
> 

hope you get good wifi coverage around the house and put wifi adaptors in the
PCS's,

or, use existing ethernet and copper and use wifi to connect between rooms.

> Do I need to buy PCI cards?  Can somebody point me to something that 
> is supported and available?
> 

hmm .. the current state of wireless support on Linux seems quite poor.  Binary
only drivers and Windows Drivers loaded in a wrapper.  The last 2 pcmcia cards
I bought were a Hawking 54M 802.11g card and a noname ebuyer card.  Both were
the TI ACX chipsets and both refused to work adequately under SuSE 9.2.  I
daresay I could have recompiled the latest  drivers and kernel.  But sometimes
lifes too short.  

The next pcmcia wifi card I buy will be a Linksys WAG511 a+b+g

This is supposedly the atheros chipset and is supported under Linux as the
madwifi driver.  There is also a WAG311 which is a PCI card. This again is
supposed to be the atheros chipset, and as such should be OK under Linux

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=52756

Wifi chipsets and stuff are listed at 
http://www.linux-wlan.org/docs/wlan_adapters.html.gz



> Or 'wireless ethernet bridges' should work since the desktop 
> machines already have ethernet cards.
> 
I guess you mean your house has computers in one room connected to internet via
wires and a router, and at least one other room with more PC's in that want to
share resources / internet connectivity with the others, 
And you don't want to run CAT 5 around the house joining the rooms together,
_but_ you don't mind having bits of CAT 5 in individual rooms.

This has an advantage in that, you can generally get cat 5 reliably into a
corner of a room, but getting wifi may be more difficult.

You could get a WRT54GS  as the main access point and a WET54GS5
(http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=7504275093&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=82908)

as a wired to wireless bridge/ wifi repeater.  The connect one set of PC's to
the first AP and the second the the WEt54gs5 using copper. 
This looks like it will work without any tomfoolery or hacking of the devices. 
But it is more expensive.

I would purchase 2x WRT54GS and use them instead. 

You would need to put a custom firmware on at least one of them though depending
how you set it up.

You can either set them both to be AP's and use WDS to bridge between them.  

the advantage of this is that you could bridge all the wireless and wired
interfaces together making a nice flat network.

This will mean you have to put a custom firmware on both of them.  
Here are some notes on setting up wds on the WRT54GS
http://www.jubileegroup.co.uk/JOS/radio/WRT_doc.html

Or you could leave on of them as a standard Access Point, and set the the other
to be in client mode.  Client mode requires a custom firmware, and you would
not be able to bridge all the interfaces together, so you'd need to route
between the upstairs and downstairs. 

AED
-- 
"If you make decisions about software -- or anything -- based solely on
short-term cost and benefit, someone with a longer view can easily
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