Andre Lue wrote:
> This would be a really good feature to have.
>
> Can someone shed some light on what's needed or the obstacle why solaris is
> not there with linux and bsd as an access point?
>
The wifi stack needs to be updated to support AP functionality. This is
*not* trivial.
The networking stack would probably want to have ethernet bridging
support added, if you wanted to add switch functionality. That's
probably not trivial, but its not terribly difficult either.
Many of the kinds of devices that are ideal for AP functionality are a
bit under-powered to run Solaris... for example the common consumer AP
boxes are ~400-500MHz MIPS boxes with < 16 MB RAM and 16MB or less for
storage. (You can't fit Solaris in that storage, memory, even if you
had a MIPS or ARM port for it.)
Its really, really hard to beat the cost of the mass-produced APs with a
Solaris based box, even if you could resolve the deficiencies in the
networking stack for such functionality. (And the cost is not just the
cost of the components, but also the increased cost in heat/power, and
cooling, plus the "time" factor -- a typical consumer AP costs less than
what I charge consulting clients for a half-hour of my time.)
If I wanted tweakability, I'd rather run a NetBSD or (*gasp!*) Linux
based WiFi router using COTS AP hardware (the linksys WRT54GL is a nice
product for this). Sites like OpenWRT can help here. As it is, I
actually run NetGear routers with stock firmware, and they work fine.
-- Garrett
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