My wife bought a WaveLAN wireless card for her laptop. She also
brought home for the weekend one of her company's wireless access
points so I could debug the setup for her. The access point is going
back to work in the morning; the WaveLAN card is staying in her
laptop.
Once I got it working, I walked all around the house and backyard, and
had good connectivity. I took a walk down the street (grown men
walking down the street reading laptops are normal, aren't we? (-: )
and found out I could get about 300 feet away before reception got
bad. The access point was near the front of the house, so that
probably helped.
The equipment roster:
Laptop: Toshiba Portege 7000CT
OS: Mandrake 7.0
(God bless her, she didn't put BillOS on it.)
Card: WaveLan/IEEE PCMCIA Gold 802.11
Access Point: 3Com AirConnect 802.11
So now we're thinking about setting up a wireless home network
permanently. Has anybody done this? Recommendations? Warnings?
Is there a good reason to get an access point? So far as I can tell,
the advantages are that it comes with a good antenna and is easy to
set up. The disadvantages are that there's no packet filtering, at
least on the 3Com, and they're pricey. The network also
operates in a different mode, peer-to-peer, but I don't really
understand what that means.
We're in the middle of Silicon Valley, so I think it's a question of
when, not whether, somebody tries to hack into our LAN. So, even
though the current system isn't set up with encryption, it will need
to be encrypted at the very least.
Yes, I've searched the net for HOWTOs and found the mother-HOWTO:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/
--
K<bob>
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.jogger-egg.com/
