[NCLUG] wireless ethernet

[Eric Brunson]

* Sean Reifschneider (nclug at nclug.org) [010615 11:34]:
> On Mon, Jun 11, 2001 at 02:05:13PM -0600, Quent wrote:
> >802.11b is the way to go currently, unless you're worried about the
> 
> Yes, 802.11b works great...
> 
> >Linksys cards and access points have been getting cheaper lately.  I set
> 

[snip]

> The Wavelan/Lucent Orinoco cards are definitely the way to go.  We have the
> Addtron cards (Prism II chipset, as are the Linksys I believe) working, but
> it was after much pain and suffering.  Note that we haven't gotten them to
> work successfully in Adhoc mode which means that an AP was required.  The
> Wavelan works fine in Ad-hoc mode, and costs maybe $20 more.

I'm not totally up to speed with the terminology, but if Ad-hoc means
several machines working in a peer-to-peer sort of mode, I did some
digging and found that if you comment out two lines in the wvlan_cs.c
file in the pcmcia-cs wireless modules the Linksys cards will talk to
each other without an access point.

line 1169 and 1170 in pcmcia-cs-3.1.26/wireless/wvlan_cs.c:

    if (!rc)
        rc = wvlan_hw_setporttype(&local->ifb, local->port_type);

Comment those out, rebuild, install and the cards will start talking
to each other.

I got my network running at home as simply as installing that hacked
module, running Bastille-Linux on my firewall machine to secure it and
set up NAT, a little pinch of essence and *BAM*, I'm surfing from the
backyard.

I've borrowed a third Linksys card and will try it out with the
Linksys PCI adapter in my desktop this weekend.  I don't know if the
pcmcia stuff will recognize it, but if anyone's interested I'll let
you know how it goes.

FWIW,
e.

-- 
Eric Brunson - brunson at level3.net - page-eric at level3.net  

"When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people
fear the government there is tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson