On Fri, 05 May 2006 13:15:17 +1200 Don Gould wrote: > Don't know about the rest of you but I found Dale's presentation on BSD > very useful. > > It highlighted a number of issues for me... > > Wireless in the non-ms spear is simply not simple enough. The fact that > neither Nick or I could quickly connect to anything is an issue.
I was easily able to associate with your access point, but getting an ip address when you had turned off dhcp was an issue. adhoc is fine if you want a point to point transmission, but its hard to see the point most of the time. > > Regardless of OS it was clear that setting up an ad-hoc network is > complex and the tools simply don't work as expected. And its not the way it is really supposed to work anyway. Thats why they make access points, and cards that are capable of acting as access points. > > It was interesting to see the the BSD camp consider a wifi card nothing > more than another ip device so it's completely integrated into > ipconfig. ipconfig is a windows program, I think you mean ifconfig > I am perplexed about why linux requires a whole new subset of > tools just to configure a wifi card. Thou I'm sure that in later > versions of linux we're going to see the iw range of tools integrated > into ifconfig to reduce confusion. see Neil's answer, and consider that it doesn't matter if the command is called ifconfig, iwconfig, or brian. What is really important is that it is well documented and that it stays consistent across versions. Otherwise your carefully crafted scripts break. You could write a tool right now that mimics the BSD ifconfig and calls both the native ifconfig and the native iwconfig as needed. > > I thought the oo style of configuration was quite clean and useful. I > know that this is also done in linux, just in a different way, thou Dale > did send me off to do some thinking last night. > > Building a turnkey solution for service delivery is a complex task and > what seems clear to me is that it doesn't get any less complex by > changing OS. The good news seems to be that mirroring efforts on a BSD > platform isn't going to be that complex once we have the basic tools > running properly. > What basic tools are you referring to? Wireless ones? Theres plenty of good tools out there. Try pebble for a start, and there are a couple of variants on it. > Again, thanks Dale for taking the time to present something new and > different to us. > Yes it was great to be refreshed on FreeBSD. It is looking just fine. I am itching to install and play. My laptop has a fairly fresh install and not much data. It might get the BSD treatment. I'll have to check out the wireless chipset compatibility. -- Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
