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Heh. Yeah. Let's use the shotgun approach - after all, it's the most scholarly and learned method of problem solving. Why not add another for mid-spring, just in case? (Have you priced this stuff?)

http://www.orinocowireless.com/downloads/products/gigalink/DS_0708_GIGALINK_US.pdf

-30C to 60C operating. IIRC, that's not quite up spec for a Mars mission, but it should be adequate for any place on Earth's surface.

It just doesn't fucking work.

I'll second that. Mine's worked without any issues for several "red-hat-versions". (Switched to Mandrake recently, but it's an effective measure nonetheless.) Supposedly much better than the linksys / dlink / netgear variety, and not much more expensive.

http://www.orinocowireless.com/

But, assuming you mean by an "Orinoco card", a wireless Orinoco card, you could always check for open community LANs in the areas you are travelling. At http://www.toaster.net/wireless/community.html there's a list of open wirless LANs, including four such LANs in the UK, one specifically in London.

You haven't tried an Orinoco setup then. They ship by default with WEP turned on and with the latest drivers they avoid the weak keys problems of WEP. A very nice setup, even out of the box, for your average user.

The other one that has received quite a bit of press around here is the Slimp3 player. The slimp3 is a nice player, especially if you want something that you can hack, since the source code and architecture is all open.

If you want to make any wired network player wireless, there are products available.

If you can mount antennas behind the walls, inside the buildings, and pointing to each other, you might be able to try a 24dBi directional antenna with 1 Watt amplifiers. You can find these antennas, cables, and the adaptors to connect to Cisco or Orinoco equipment. I wouldn't use the Apple Airport or Linksys consumer grade wireless equipment... I'd try to stick with the enterprise "survive anything" grade equipment such as Cisco's Aironet 350 bridges or Orinoco's ROR-1000s.

You can see what we're doing at the University of Connecticut where we're using a combination of Cisco Aironet 350 bridges and Hyperlink Antennas and amps to connect a Research Vessel steaming around Long Island Sound. We recently went out with the American School for the Deaf.

If you have some dry pairs (unused pairs of telephone wire going from one building to the next) you could also try PairGain equipment. We use those as well at UConn... they are point to point DSL modems... last I heard, they can push 5Mbs.

If you have any questions about the wireless stuff, you can e-mail me. Good luck!

If you can mount antennas behind the walls, inside the buildings, and pointing to each other, you might be able to try a 24dBi directional antenna with 1 Watt amplifiers. You can find these antennas, cables, and the adaptors to connect to Cisco or Orinoco equipment. I wouldn't use the Apple Airport or Linksys consumer grade wireless equipment... I'd try to stick with the enterprise "survive anything" grade equipment such as Cisco's Aironet 350 bridges or Orinoco's ROR-1000s.

You can see what we're doing at the University of Connecticut where we're using a combination of Cisco Aironet 350 bridges and Hyperlink Antennas and amps to connect a Research Vessel steaming around Long Island Sound. We recently went out with the American School for the Deaf.

If you have some dry pairs (unused pairs of telephone wire going from one building to the next) you could also try PairGain equipment. We use those as well at UConn... they are point to point DSL modems... last I heard, they can push 5Mbs.

If you have any questions about the wireless stuff, you can e-mail me. Good luck!

Well, whatever their name is today, the Lucent/Wavelan wireless ethernet card is pretty well supported. Lucent has released their own binary-only drivers, but from reading the wireless mailing lists (or faqs, I forget), they also seem to work with the person who has developed the Open Source drivers as well.

I would suggest the Orinoco RG-1000. It has dialup, ethernet, NAT, is hackable, can be flashed with the latest Airport Firmware, and if you know the right People, can be had for $50 or so.

I've got one, and I love it.

Try this. Get 1 Watt amplifiers, 24dBi directional antennas, and 50' of LMR400 cabling from Hyperlink Technologies as a kit. Get two kits. Then, get two Orinoco ROR-1000 bridges and Orinoco's 802.11b gold pc cards. You should be able to stretch that distance. We are using the same equipment, but with 15dBi wide angle and omni antennas for a ship to shore connection. We get about 10-15 mi. (we're using lower gain antennas than the 24dBi directionals.) You can check it out here. If you just need a point-to-point solution, using the Hyperlink 24dBi directional / amp kit and Orinoco ROR-1000s may be the way to go.

The latest firmware available for your wavelan cards will force them to randomize the initialization vector used in WEP. For those of you that read the paper on breaking it, this is part of what makes it trivial. I would like to see this test run again with the random IV's. I'm sure it doesn't increase the difficulty by too much.

Because it would obviously require software driven crypto, which would mean you need a fairly powerful generic PSU, which would eat power, produce more heat and cost more. So they use an ASIC instead, which is much more efficient but less flexible.

However, most boards do include a firmware which controls some aspects of the crypto, for instance the latest firmware from Lucent includes a Random WEP initialization vector to alleviate the static nature of WEP keys'.

But obviously you can't go changing whole crypto algorithm though because you hit the barrier of the physical layer.