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Theo Zourzouvillys wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tuesday 24 September 2002 4:21 pm, Adrian Midgley wrote:I remember Simon W speaking on Linux boxes doing bridging.linux + bridging + wavelan = problems!
Do you really need bridging? I use a Linux box in Ad-Hoc mode as a gateway, no access points, no bridging. Bridging is only needed to extend range, just like a wired LAN bridge, and no one uses bridges these days in their wired networks... well I exagerate a little, but hardware routing is cheap these days, when bridges were popular this was not so. If you need bridging is probably far more effect to put an access point that does it in the right locations, probably with the handy wall mounting that Intel ship their soon to be discontinued APs with. The product Theo mentioned will do infrastructure mode with some cards I think, so you can use Linux as an Access Point, and roam between wireless networks that are linked by one physical ethernet, which is a kind of bridging, but called roaming. AP that do bridging and roaming are now so cheap it is hard to justify setting up a Linux PC to do it, unless you intend to make a Wireless firewall product or similar ;)
I was forced to just use standard routing on my lummox box with a pcmcia pci card + lucent/orinoco card.
I opted for Lucent as well, although the bundled orinoco driver is only recently upto the job. pcmcia_cs is your friend - install the latest - even if it is from source! I've never had 802.11b cards not interoperate at all. Although mixing and matching can be a pain as the software (especially GUI based ones) often sets the encryption options in different ways, or one only supports 64bit WEP, so you need to know that "secret" in vendor A's software maps to some hexadecimal string in vendor B's. So if you are buying to build an Office set up buy all of one type, it simplifies builds and installs. If you are buying to go on the road with a Microsoft powered laptop, buy from a vendor who has bought the sophisticated Prism 2 client software from Intersil, or a vendor who ships good software (like Lucent, or SMC). Look for the option to save WLAN settings (office, home settings), and to easily scan for a public networks. For Linux you just want good software support, which is probably Prism 2 based PCMCIA cards, although Prism/Prism 2 has been criticised in some quarters for not being brilliant radiowise, my experience is it is okay. I still prefer my Lucent cards, but that is probably just familiarity. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.