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...or iFS, but that would probably bring a lawsuit from Apple or Linksys (although most likely the former)...

Don't forget about people using NDISWrapper, which is the only way to get such cards working on Linux at all unless someone has written a driver recently.

There is a native driver, but neither it nor ndiswrapper work worth a damn with my AMD64 Gentoo install. For the time being, I've given up on getting Linux WiFi working and just hang a Linksys WTR54GS off the network jack when I need to connect to someone's wireless network.

You can also replace the bcmwl5.sys file, usually located at C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS with the one provided by linksys, just download linksys drivers from here , extract them, disable your network adapter, copy the new bcmwl5.sys (make a backup of your own bcmwl5.sys just in case...) and activate the card again. It is a temporary solution but it's better than nothing and you don't change the name of your network card. Tested on a Dell MiniPCI 1300 WLAN and it works.

Netcraft says the server we "speak" to is running on Lyenucks, nevertheless, go to http://www.linksys.com/products and when the page fully loads, select one of the product line links. Hit the back button, then the forward button. All's well. Then hit the back button and select the same link again so you can watch all the images get sent afresh from the server. Even if they didn't have a "Cache-Control: private" header (note the use of the MIME Content-Disposition header in an HTTP transaction!) they would not be cacheable due to being ever new.

I just don't get it. These outfits must have unlimited bandwidth to burn (and think I do too).

I'm using a Linksys ADSL2MUE which seems to fit the description of what you want.

Here's a review

Here's where I bought mine.

Hope that helps.

This thing looks small and cool enough that you could just make it a portable router and skip the WiFi/ndiswrapper tangle for a Linux laptop?

Like this, but at twice the price?

I haven't been able to get the ear of large networks, but I realized a long time ago that digital video was heading in the direction that you are complaining about. I decided to try and do something about it and created the WideSAN digital video distribution method that should satisfy content owners and end users.

Competing standards and services--Every one of these new services or networks that launch web video seem to require their own unique "player" or codec to use. Even the iPod video player has failed to standardize this.

Lack of a good media center solution--Despite promising results with Windows Media Center, MythTV, etc. there still really isn't a good standard solution to pumping so many different formats of video from your computer to your TV. I myself basically had to end up connecting my computer's s-video output directly to my TV (and even that required an expensive ground loop isolator to get rid of banding and video noise). Newer HDTV's with VGA inputs might help this, but you would think that someone by now would have developed a decent stand-alone box that could transfer video from your computer to your TV over your network in a variety of formats REALIABLY. So far they all feature either piss-poor performance or are VERY picky and flaky about the video formats they'll play.

DRM--this is related to #1 and #2. Content providers are still ridiculously cautious about locking everything down with DRM, to the point that viewing the video over a network or every using a standard media player becomes extremely difficult. Yet another roadblock to making any one service or content provider "mainstream" enough for much popularity.

Problem: Why doesn't the driver work on 64-bit and bigendian systems?
Answer: We have no resource for that. Neither hardware, nor workforce.

Linksys makes a very nice firewall/router that allows 2 simultanious VPNs. If there are more than 3 sites you could go for a Smoothwall server using an old PC and 2 nics.

*nods enthusiastically*

I've got one of these too --- it's awesome. It's my house server; it's got 250GB of disk, and it does firewall and routing services with two ethernet interfaces, it's my internal file server via NFS, my outward facing HTTP, IMAP and SMTP servers, and basically performs beyond the call of duty pretty much non-stop. It's also a box 10cm x 12cm x 2cm with no moving parts, and consumes a negligable amount of power. As I said, it's awesome.

The only problem with it is that 32MB of RAM is not, frankly, enough. Thanks to the magic of swap it copes fine, but if you try to make it do anything that involves allocating reasonable amounts of memory it starts to chug. aptitude, in particular, involves big datasets and is horribly slow --- it takes two minutes to start up (in non-GUI mode).

It is upgradable; but only if you're good at replacing surface-mount RAM chips. Which I'm not. At some point I'm going to try and get hold of a fattened one, but I'm definitely going to get someone else to do it for me.

There are a bunch of consumer level devices designed to have a USB hard drive plugged into them and export SMB shares from it. They are all around $80 or so. I have this one: http://www1.linksys.com/products/product.asp?prid= 640 but there are a bunch of ones by other companies.

It runs linux out of the box, but I've flashed mine to run a full debian system, only 32MB of RAM is the main draw back. But its attached to 3 USB drives in a software RAID, and a CD storage device, and a thumb drive (for the main system - so the disks don't get hit by every cron job). Plus plugging my digital camera into it downloads all the photos into dated directories on the 'photos' share. It also serves some web pages, mainly a cgi interface to eject disks from the CD storage device.

Works well for me, and it's a reasonably cheap and pysically small (and very underpowered CPU/memory wise) linux machine with 2 USB ports and a network port.

I was just looking for something to do this same thing. I haven't solved the problem yet, but Netgear and Linksys have some inexpensive stuff. I ordered the Linksys RV042 and it should arrive today. I'm anxiously awaiting setting it up and testing it because of the Dual WAN functionality. My second internet connection should arrive on Thursday :)

http://www.netgear.com/products/business/prod_vpnr outer_wired_security_sb.php
http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Produ ct_C1&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1117775454480& pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper

I've just learned that modern versions of the wrt54G are vxworks based, but the old versions are still out there that are linux based

That old version is still sold new as the WRT54GL. I just bought one yesterday, after a little in-store googling to figure out the differences between all of the WRT54G* models.

1. cost. More logic costs more money. That said, some of them are including that kind of functionailty now, but I don't have any direct experience with any of those. :)
2. complexity. If the user can change packet filtering rules around, that's one more fairly complicated step the phone "techs" have to be trained to deal with.

Well, if you look at the top left corner on this site, you'll see that Linksys is a division of Cisco Systems. The very same Cisco that is the subject of the article.

I really don't think they are planning on selling the standard home user a 7200VXR chassis!

The easiest solution is to get a Linksys NSLU2 and two external (USB) drives of any capacity you like. That'll get you the SMB shares.

Then configure the NSLU2 to back up from one drive to another. While technically this isn't RAID, it's accomplishing the same ends.

That should do the job. Then you can proceed to hack it, if you are so inclined :)

LinkSys NSLU2. Plugs into your home network. (10/100) Then you get yourself 2 IDE drives and 2 USB 2.0 enclosures then plug them in. Then you can set it to periodically back-up one drive to the other. Sure, it's not as bullet-proof as RAID5. But it's dead simple, cheap, and it just works. Failure recovery is dead simple. Also, the system is has some of the same flexibility as the Buffalo Teraserver. (Plug in your friend's USB 2.0 drive when he comes over.)

Also, with this scheme, you can delete a file and change your mind. (Recover from the back-up before the weekly copy job.)

And, if this is too simple for your geek quotient, it's Linux-based and hackable!

Buy Cisco. (Linksys for you home users out there)

Yes, you'll pay more. But there's a reason the US military buys cisco.

I don't see it mentioned at nslu2-linux.org, is it based on the same hardware and firmware?

--dave

Having the backup done by normal file copying rather than RAID is not a problem in my view - after all, backup is the purpose, and that's done by the firmware. RAID ain't always ideal: A friend of mine had a nice RAID5 setup in his computer. Then the primary drive got corrupted - and that was immediately mirrored to the second drive! He lost all his data...

No mention of the NSLU2 is complete without noting that it's eminently hackable. :)

Okay, I know DirecTV refuses to support *any* of the networking functions on DirecTiVo units; I have a Linksys WUSB54G plugged in to the USB port on my Philips DSR704R17, but it's not recognized. What do I need to do to enable all these nifty features on my DirecTiVo unit?

...go with the CIT200 instead. I don't usually plug commercial products like this, but in my opinion it's the first device which provides a legitimate VoIP landline alternative for home users.

actually linksys does make cable modems, as well as voip routers and the usual products like hubs, etc. Look here

In addition, it pushes well beyond the data center to touch consumers where they live.

This story is almost 24 hours old... Cisco most certainly wants to integrate itself into every part of digital data transmission. Since there are alot of people watching "digital tv" it is a sensible purchase.

Look at what else Cisco has done. They have a voip phone that integrates with Skype
http://www1.linksys.com/international/product.asp? coid=52&ipid=821

If you get vonage, you often get a Cisco ATA box to turn your analog phone into a digital signal...

It is a great strategy for Cisco. They want to sell both parts of the package, the core routers for the Internet. DSL and cable modem concentrators for the central office. DSL and cable modems.

I wonder if they will keep the company name or roll them into Linksys as a consumer product. I also wonder how microsoft will react. They want to get a version of their OS on cable boxes.

Time will tell

Linksys is also coming out with the WRT54GL, which appears to simply be the WRT54G v4 hardware relabeled.

The Italian Linksys site shows it (bring babelfish), but the US site does not yet, except for their GPL Code Center.

More in this forum thread.

These are all very low power, no noise, takes minutes to set up (except if hacking them, of course :), Just Work.

Good luck!

-Henrik

Linksys WRT54GS http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?childpage name=US%2FLayout&packedargs=c%3DL_Product_C2%26cid %3D1126536698937&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisit orWrapper + OpenWRT http://www.openwrt.org/ = < $100

As far as finding some way to improve your reception without modifying the hardware, you're probably out of luck. Outside of building some sort of active repeater (which would be expensive, potentially illegal, and a much bigger pain to carry around than any alternative), it's hard to think of a way improve the antenna in the laptop itself.

That's not true. Linksys makes the WRE54G range expander. Simple little device that works pretty well and doesn't cost too much. Just drop it near a power outlet and you're good to go.

As far as finding some way to improve your reception without modifying the hardware, you're probably out of luck. Outside of building some sort of active repeater (which would be expensive, potentially illegal, and a much bigger pain to carry around than any alternative), it's hard to think of a way improve the antenna in the laptop itself.

That's not true. Linksys makes the WRE54G range expander. Simple little device that works pretty well and doesn't cost too much. Just drop it near a power outlet and you're good to go.

Have you looked at Linksys' NSLU2? There's a very active community focused on exploiting the flexibility of a low-cost, low-energy, Linux-based NAS device. I don't have one myself, but have been eyeing one for some time.

I recommend the Linksys NSLU2 for cheap NAS. It has no storage itself but takes USB drives and shares them. It also has a great comminity that has replaced the stripped down stock embedded linux with a full featured one.
In addition to serving up disk space with Samba (the firmware I have will do up to 512GB but I'm a little behind. It could allow more now), mine serves a couple moderately trafficked websites, runs a daap server for music, has a bittorrent client running fulltime and acts as a VPN gateway to my office. Sure you can do all of this with a dedicated headless PC, but this thing costs ~$100, runs silent and is tiny (~5"x4"x.8").

Linksys makes something similar to what you're discussing.

http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?childpage name=US%2FLayout&packedargs=c%3DL_Product_C2%26cid %3D1118334822574&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisit orWrapper

This is not intended to be a flame as I really like FreeBSD as well. FreeBSD could learn a lot from the OpenBSD project in this area. I have been absolutely amazed at OpenBSD's out of the box wireless detection configuration. I installed OpenBSD on my laptop over my WPC11 wireless NIC without effort. I also had the same results with the WMP54G.

This is not intended to be a flame as I really like FreeBSD as well. FreeBSD could learn a lot from the OpenBSD project in this area. I have been absolutely amazed at OpenBSD's out of the box wireless detection configuration. I installed OpenBSD on my laptop over my WPC11 wireless NIC without effort. I also had the same results with the WMP54G.

I believe (according to the manufactures) the typical range for 802.11a/b/g is about 100-150 ft. indoors (source). So how does this help people in a day to day work enviroment? I don't think many companies pack their workers that tightly together. For conventions and such it'll make setup a breeze, but you have to stay within the FCC regulations... so range would be an issue.

Not all Linksys products are based on Linux, I think. The WRT54G is, though -- try downloading the source for it.

You mean like this: I just picked one at random and guess what not source the GPL link is grayed out.

http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?childpage name=US%2FLayout&packedargs=page%3D2%26cid%3D11154 16835852%26c%3DL_Content_C1&pagename=Linksys%2FCom mon%2FVisitorWrapper&SubmittedElement=Linksys%2FFo rmSubmit%2FProductDownloadSearch&sp_prodsku=112119 4966438

I really dislike generalization!!

Cisco's consumer-grade routers do run Linux, as do many of their competitors'.

I have and regularly use the Linksys dongle (USBBT100) with Linux. It works fine as far as I can tell.

I agree with you about the absurdity of claiming it is illegal to list what bluetooth devices work with linux. I really wish the web page author stood his ground, the Bluetooth SIG is just making stuff up.

I was basicaly doing this on a 486 33Mhz pc using shorewall and a tc script, untill i replaced it with a linksys wrt54G running openwrt, shorewall and wondershaper.
the openwrt handle everything i throw at it. on my 5/5Mbit link, with low cpu consumption (10-30% depending on load). and the pingtimes are lovely with wondershaper.
the linksys isn't a powerhouse exactly, and a shorewall restart akes about 90 seconds. but with iptables save/restore, this is a nonissue. Boottimes are quite acceptable compared to all semiadvancved routers out there. Not that you ever reboot the thing...

I Admit that it do takes quite a beating to saturate my 5/5 in the first place, but it happened frequently enoughf to be worth the 30 minutes it took to setup shorewall and wondershaper on the router.

the wrt54g+opwnwrt have lower power consumption then a full pc, and very low noise compared to a pc. But still remain a full linux with the ipkg package management, allowing you the usualy freedom you experience in linux. Something you dont get from all the custom firmwares out there.

And It's dead easy to install for even the least technical inclined gamer out there. But it do require the use of ssh and reading skills, so it's a notch harder then custom firmware's that use the webinterface only.

sepski

Hotspot in a box
AirSpot
Last but not least

Those two aren't necessarily practical, but options are more varied than they used to be. Consider this situation: my dad is a stock/bond broker. They're about to move to Lake Travis (about 30 miles from Austin, TX). He needs a constant connection. He can't get cable or DSL. A 1/4 T1 would be $300/month. Is that reasonable? Hardly. My recommendation: Dual WAN sources. 1. Satellite at $60/month for about 450 Mbps (.5 second latency is acceptable for data transfers), and 2. ISDN at $40/month (as a backup during periods of inclement weather. I will have him hooked to a dual-WAN router, for failover purposes. Linksys RV042

"Linksys make great routers", so i've heard ...

Except for the WAG54G (I would have post a link here, but their site seems to be broken atm ... how come? :) ah, here ya go anyway: http://www.linksys.com/international/product.asp?c oid=6&ipid=371

In theory, it's a fine piece of hardware in one box ... It has an ADSL model, a firewall, a router, a couple of wired ethernet ports, and a nice little antenna for the wireless LAN part.

Except that it doesn't work ... The wireless connection stays up for at most 4 hours (mostly it's only half an hour or so) with the only solution for more internet time is to power it off and on again.

That is ... if it wants to boot on power up. If you're lucky ... very lucky, it might boot right away. If you're a bit less lucky, you might need to try 10 times. If you're having a bad day, it won't boot at all.

Fine piece of hardware huh?

Other times, the wireless connection stays up, but the DSL connection goes down. Again the only solution to be ... you guessed that right ... power off, power on. oh wait, it doesn't boot ... power off, power on and repeat that a couple of times.

Update the firmware you say? Well, they do make new firmware though, but they never release it. The latest official firmware is 1.02.1 which is more than a year old and produces this crap. Once they released 1.02.5, only to pull it off their website very soon after. Their developpers seem to have made it to 1.02.7 and beyond, but it never got anywhere stable.

Yeah, Linksys produces fine hardware. Or so I've heard.

Tristan.

Let's see. According to this ling http://www.linksys.com/products/wirelessstandards. asp WIFI range is 100-150 feet for an indoors AP. In other words... Given a map of San Francisco and a list of APs, I can get roughly 30-50 meter location accuracy as soon as I can spot an AP.

http://www.linksys.com/products/product.asp?grid=3 4&scid=29&prid=142

With a linksys wrt54g and this new "beta" firmware (linksys release, not 3rd party) you can have wpa2 right now.
ftp://ftp.linksys.com/sg/support/download/broadban d_router/WRT54G_WRT54GS/WRT54GWRT54GSBeta_Firmware _for_Wireless_Transfer_Issues/
You'll need to have a card that supports wpa2 in the drivers as well. There are a few out there.

Hm, at first I thought a 100W assumed load was kind of big, but let's have a look-see here:

My server is a PIII 600, 2 harddrives, video card, 2 NICs, and some other crap. According to my UPS, it, along with my cable modem and 8 port 10/100 hub, draw 32% of UPS capacity at idle, and when compiling a kernel ... (wait for it while the test finishes...) 32% of UPS capacity again (yay for confusing and possibly unreliable tests.)

I have an APC Back-UPS ES 350, which has a 200W peak capacity, so 200W*32% = 64W. Let's say the cable modem and hub together draw 14W, which is not unreasonable, then the computer itself draws 50W.

Now, power is included in my utilities, but let's see how much this'd cost if it weren't. I live in Westwood, Los Angeles, CA and here LADWP wants .07288 dollars / KWh (http://www.ladwp.com/ladwp/cms/ladwp001710.jsp) for residential service (which is the most expensive.) The server's on 24/7 all year, so 24 hours/day * 365 days/year * 64W * .07288 cents / KWh = $40/year.

Now, the server was free and so discounting all the time I spent installing and configuring Gentoo Linux on it, its cost is essentially $40/year until something breaks.

Let's say I wanted to get a simple Linksys router to do NAT and firewalling (whilst the server will also crunch numbers, serve pages, store photos and music, and so on...), and I pick the WRT54G which goes for around $60 on Froogle and ignore shipping costs. The spec sheet (ftp://ftp.linksys.com/datasheet/wrt54gv2_ds.pdf) says it draws 12W, but we know its going through a powerbrick and those can be pretty inefficient, so let's assume it really draws 15W +/- 5W at the plug. Now then, its total cost is $60 + $9/year +/- $3/year.

The Almighty Buck Wants to Know: when will the standalone unit be worth it? Well, the break-even point will come when their costs will be equal over time, so at 40 dollars / year * x years = 60 dollars + 9 dollars / year * x years, the standalone will start saving me money in about 2 years. It turns out that because of the high per year cost of the server, the relatively small variations in the cost of the standalone per year are pretty much irrelevant.

OK, this has been pretty exhausting, but let's consider some more possibilities:
1. If the Linksys was made in China, what were the environmental costs of manufacturing it? Of obtaining the plastics necessary to make it? Pretty much everything is cheaper in China, so what'd the cost of the unit be if it were made in the US or EU?
1b. If I couldn't get the unit made in China, would it still be worth it to buy it? I'd guess that it might take quite a few more years for it to be worth it.
2. What if the power brick dies in a year or two? Maybe the warranty's only a year and I'll have to get a whole new unit.

Now, this is all fine and dandy, so yeah, it looks like the Linksys'd be the way to go if all I wanted was NAT/firewall/routing, but here are two more points:

1. I have an older 486 that probably draws half as much as the PIII. It now takes 4 years for the investment to pay off, and that's a long time when you're 24 like I am.
2. I pay ~$500 / month in rent; these costs we're talking about minimizing are really pretty insignificant compared to the cost of living. Right about half my budget goes into rent.

Check out the Linksys NSLU2 NAS device. It has a couple USB ports, a Netword adapter, a 266MHz ARM processor, 32MB RAM and an active community porting apps to it.

A website running on this obviusly couldn't stand up to a slashdotting, but it will work for a personal site and does a good job of streaming media around the house (aside from its primary function as a Samba server)

The thing draws next to no power and could easliy replace many of the space heaters wasting power in the average geek's basement.

try http://www.linksys.com/products/product.asp?prid=6 51&scid=38

Its not a true voip phone, but it lets your current phones pretend