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Newer page: version 14 Last edited on Tuesday, December 16, 2003 10:18:13 pm by BlairHarrison Revert
Older page: version 13 Last edited on Monday, October 6, 2003 10:34:40 pm by GregHarris Revert
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 now the question is.. will i be able to simply plug my wireless card into the laptop.. and get assigned a dhcp address (after adding the appropriate entries to dhcpd.conf) and it will all work... lets wait and see. 
  
 UPDATE - It really was that simple. ive been using the setup for a few months now.. and it works well. ive had minimal problems.. in fact currently im having more problems on my wired lan than on the wireless. 
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+!!Trog's Experience in setting up a wireless network or three  
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+Working for a WISP does have it's advantages, in that I get to learn a lot about the different kinds of WirelessEthernetBridge and [PCMCIA] cards.  
+For my home link, I used to have an Orinoco Silver 802.11b card with an ISA bridge card into my server, and an Orinoco RG1000 with AP500 firmware loaded at the other end, unfortunately this caused me no end of trouble, and I was getting a lot of Error -110 writing packet to BAP errors from the wireless card, causing the link to drop, and the drivers to need to be reloaded. I believe we figured out that it's due to poor link quality and have no solution at this stage. The newest drivers did help, but did not fully alleviate the problem.  
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+I now have a Linksys Wap11 version 2.2 (ha, yeah, they are crap with the linksys firmware) with the latest Dlink dwl900ap+ firmware loaded on them (the units are identical except the dlink is smaller and only has a single antenna connector). It is configured in client mode, so it will talk to the AP500 as if it were a regular wireless card. This seems to hold the connection without fail. It is a ~6km link.  
+Talk to me on IRC if you want to know anything more about this kind of setup, there are a few tricks that need to be done for it to work correctly.  
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+I also have a Micronet SP918 for my local wireless network . In being the total geek that I am, this also has a different firmware than it's original. Turns out this thing is basically a stock standard Atmel access point (can't quite remember the model number) so can be configured with the linux ap-utils package quite happily.  
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+Because I already have a [DHCP] server on my network at home, I configured the Micronet as a WirelessEthernetBridge (this is the same mode that the AP500 is in, and any good Access Point should let you do this)  
+I have a few 802.11b and g [PCMCIA] cards as well. The most recent being a 3Com 3CRWE154G72 which appears to have linux drivers, but I could not get them to work without crashing my machine. These are fairly new drivers however and I did not really have time to undertake a thorough investigation into the cause of the crashes, and instead threw the card into my windows laptop, and went back to using the Orinoco Silver card. I also have one of the Orinoco clone cards which is just a rebadged Silver card, and can be flashed to the latest 8.10 orinoco firmware easily.  
+I used to have a DWL650 d-link card, but I sold that when I got the 3Com. It was a full Prism II chipset card, so worked perfectly with the wlan-ng drivers. I believe there is also a new Prism II driver somewhere.  
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+see : http://prism54.org/ for 802.11g linux drivers for a number of cards and http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html for the linux Wireless Tools.  
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+It has been my experience that compiling the Wireless Tools and pcmcia-cs separately from the kernel always yeilds a much nicer solution and seems to simplify/remove issues regarding wireless network support. This was a big issue back when I was using a Pentium Pro 150 as a server because it would take forever to compile a new kernel, and significantly less than forever to just recompile the wireless and pcmcia (but still a long time) .  
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+I also have an Airport Extreme card in my iBook G4 which has worked with every network I've tried it with.