More Wireless Networking for Linux

I was sent word that AbsoluteValue and Intersil have announced more development of wireless support for Linux. The announcement is actually for Intersil PRISM-based WLAN cards, but what it does mean is more support for IEEE 802.11 wireless cards, access points, etc. Here at Slashdot, we've been using the ZoomAir cards, but are starting to play with the Lucent cards - what does everyone else think about Linux and wireless cards?

Comments

price

[matticus]

i think the only problem with wireless networking right now is price. i can get a 10/100 ethernet card for $10 now. I can't get a wireless card for under $100. the wireless market needs to know that in order to hit mainstream, the peripherals have to be lower priced.

Re:price

[redled]

Mainstream? I don't think that wireless cards were ever targeted at mainstream users. I think they have been targeted at both power users who like the idea of having a truly wireless laptop in thier house, and as an easy, do-it-yourself network solution for the less technical among us who don't want to/can't run wires through thier houses. To expect wireless to be mainstream is ludicrous -think about your average network, it's several stationary desktop computers in the same building. Why do these computers, which have cables running to the wall, monitor, peripherals, etc.. need a wireless system anyways? One more wire going to the wall is no big deal. I'm not going to go into details of why the cards can't be $10 -I think it's obvious that it costs more to manufacture them.

--

Re:price

[kwerle]

Mainstream? I don't think that wireless cards were ever targeted at mainstream users.

That's funny. You're implying that 10/100 cards and cables are targeted at mainstream. I think the opposite is true - wireless is targeted more at mainstream than cables ever were - or it will be soon.

Anyone remember when 10/100's cost > $100? How long do you think this will take - especially with Apple pushing the Airports...

Re:price

[Darnit]

Of course they are going to be expensive. more design time has to go into producing the high frequency amps (8 bucks before markup) and antennas (2-20 bucks before markup). A lot of the stuff is just coming off of cutting edge and will take a while to hit mass production (get cheap).

Re:price

[brianosaurus]

Yeah. Apple Airport is aimed at mainstream. I'm buying my one for my mom's iBook for her birthday. (she doesn't read slashdot (yet) so the secret is safe.

At home I have an Airport in my iMac, an Airport base in my office, and a lucent wavelan gold card in my laptop. They all work great together.

Haven't tried it with Linux yet, though.

Wireless

[RaZ0r]

How much does it actually cost to manufacture a wireless network card? And how much are we actually paying?


Lets stop praying for someone to save us and save ourselves. ~KMFDM

Re:Wireless

[um... Lucas]

You're forgetting the "how much did it cost to do the R&D necessary to build the card in the first place?", "how many developer hours were spent getting it right?", and "how many people do they have on staff to support the cards?"

Not to mention that everyone needs to make a bit of money for their efforts. If you disagree, let it be known, I'm sure lots of people would love to give you a job paying peanuts.

Wireless technology is still in it's infancy. It costs more because it's rarer. It costs more because the past R&D is still amortized. It costs more because it's not good enough, meaning money needs to be budgeted to future versions of the product that can go 10x or 100x faster.

Re:Wireless

[mindstrm]

About the same amount it costs to make anything else of the same size.
The cost is based on R&D, and the fact that they don't sell nearly as many. When everyone is buying wireless network cards, they'll be dirt cheap.

Re:Wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

> Hmm. I could go on for a while.. perhaps I should start a Wireless LAN HAcking FAQ?

Or add to the one at www.qsl.net/n9zia ...

Re:Wireless

[RaZ0r]

Thank you for your input. It is much appreciated. (no sarcasm intended)


Lets stop praying for someone to save us and save ourselves. ~KMFDM

Re:Wireless

[RaZ0r]

Thanks for the insight. I understand exactly what you are saying.


Lets stop praying for someone to save us and save ourselves. ~KMFDM

WaveLAN Cards Nice on Linux

[bridges]

We've been using the Lucent WaveLAN 11Mbps cards here, and they work like a charm. Lucent supplies (binary) drivers for their cards which work quite well. The only annoyance is that the access points have to be configured remotely VIA M$ Windoze, but it all works really well. In addition, they interoperate with the Apple iBook/AirPort stuff, too, IIRC.

Re:WaveLAN Cards Nice on Linux

[surajrai]

But aren't the total cost of deploying the wavelan based WLANs something like $1,000? Not something that I can afford. I am however thinking about going with $150 Aviator 2.4s.

Re:WaveLAN Cards Nice on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Here we are using wireless cards with 8 Mbit/s from Lucent to connect our students dorm to the university. It is a point-to-point connection between two Linux systems routing into both networks. Works VERY well and we're really pleased with our solution.

Re:WaveLAN Cards Nice on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

binary? i could be wrong (i don't have the cd handy), but i think it was open source. the gold cards i got running were just a patch and extra code in the pcmcia-cs release. compiled the new code and all worked *without a single problem*.

Re:WaveLAN Cards Nice on Linux

[austinij]

You don't have to use Lucent's WAVELAN II Access point. I personally use an Intermec 2100 Universal Accesspoint with a Lucent 11 Mbit radio specifically because you can configure the UAP with a Serial Cable, a telnet client, or any web browser. To use the telnet or web browser you must give the UAP an IP address, but if it is close enough to a PC or only needs to be configured once, the serial cable and any comms program works just fine and it can save you an IP address.

Re:WaveLAN Cards Nice on Linux

[bridges]

If the patch is from Lucent, it contains two things: a small source file to hook into the pcmcia code, and a binary library that that source file refers to. Look in /lib and you'll find libhcf.a, which contains the binary code for working the Wavelan/IEEE hardware. I *think* there may be some source-only drivers around, but not from Lucent.

Re:WaveLAN Cards Nice on Linux

[Pii]

There are two versions of the WaveLAN IEEE drivers.

One is distributed and maintained by Lucent; Open Source wrapper for Binary only libraries.

The other is maintained as a fully open source implementation. The maintainer is Andrew Neuhaus.

Each work well, but the open source version isn't as fully featured yet. That should change soon. Lucent has been extremely cooperative.

How can it be bad?

[Gokmop]

New hardware support for linux and availability under linux is only positive in my mind. It shows that the OS is moving forward, and more than that, that it isn't just an OS for punk hackers like me. :)

Ever since I've heard that Mandrake and all those folks at VA have a wireless LAN I can't think about this type of thing without drooling all over myself. I've had extremely limited experience with cellular modems, all of which totally sucked. But I've heard that cards like this are quite good.

Of course the whole wireless thing does give more of a blatant angle on the privacy issue...I hope no one is under the illusion that they're going to have privacy when using these things. Unless of course they gpg their data. :)

Re:How can it be bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course the whole wireless thing does give more of a blatant angle on the privacy issue...I hope no one is under the illusion that they're going to have privacy when using these things. Unless of course they gpg their data. :) not true at all. wep - the wireless encryption protocol affords a significant amount of security (as everything that is transferred over the wireless media is first encrypted (128bit if I remember correctly)) additionally FHSS (frequency hopping spread spectrum allows A huge amount of security b/c its is constantly changing which frequencies its using to transmit on - believe me reassembling a packet of that type is non trivial. I used to work for a company that is a wireless isp (providing wireless internet access via a variety of products) its pretty cool. I had a 3mb link to my house for a while - it costs next to nothing and it worked great. (although whiteout conditions can do nasty things to your signal strength)

Re:How can it be bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curios as to which products the wireless ISP that you mentioned used to provide service to its customers. I've been looking around for some good equipment to provide high-speed internet access to a few clients over a wireless connection and haven't come up anything that's really affordable enough for them, as well as non-line of sight. Any ideas?

Re:How can it be bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

wep - the wireless encryption protocol affords a significant amount of security

Yes, but is WEP used in these devices?

additionally FHSS (frequency hopping spread spectrum allows A huge amount of security b/c its is constantly changing which frequencies its using to transmit on - believe me reassembling a packet of that type is non trivial.

Oh yes, data transmitted by a wireless LAN card would need a complex device to receive and reconstruct the data... like another wireless LAN card. With all due respect to the late TTB, Heddy Lamarr, this is nto a "huge" amount of security.

Re:How can it be bad?

[pfolk]

Lucent Silver and Gold cards have WEP support (40-bit DES for Silver, 128-bit for Gold), and this is supported by the Linux driver provided by Lucent (for Silver at least; my work with the code doesn't look like it supports the longer keys but I may be wrong).

Unfortunately (this is a problem with the standard) WEP is not public-key. So on one hand it will still be somewhat secure when quantumn computing comes out. On the other, that means I can only make the network secure if I trust the hosts. If it were public key, I could have the hosts hear the router and the router hear the hosts without the hosts hearing each other. But I guess that's what IPSec and ssh are for...

Pete

Re:How can it be bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

WEP is only useful for those who think firewalls are useful... In other words, all WEP does is encrypt your traffic to the access point. There are a limited number of keys that can be used to encrypt the traffic and there has to be some mechanism to distribute the keys -- so it is really likely that the other users of the AP will have the same WEP key as you (which means that they can decrypt your packets at will). The only thing WEP helps with is to keep some random person off the street from looking at your packets. As for frequency hopping -- that isn't going to really buy you anything since the faster 802.11 is all direct sequence and it seems that that is the way the world is going. (yes, some idiot(s) decided that 802.11 Frequency hopping is NOT compatible with 802.11 direct sequence)

Re:How can it be bad?

[Keeper ofthe Keys]

WEP is an OK method ... the keys are hashed from the MAC address of the WLAN card, so they're unique for each card. I *think* (going from memory here) they use 40 or 128bit RSA hash, but i'll have to check that one out more thoroughly.

Re:How can it be bad?

[atlan]

Take a look at this, for all the security you will ever need. :) http://www.xs4all.nl/~freeswan/ They are looking for people implementing TwoFish, currently it is only 3DES which is secure but takes a hell of CPU-Load to process. Like a Pentium 166MMX can decrypt/encrypt at 2Mbit/s.

webgear cards are quite good

[bugzilla]

The Aviator cards from WebGear are very good. And fairly inexpensive as well. You can get a 2-station kit here. I use them at home and can take my laptop to a friends house and walk right into their network by bouncing dhcpcd. I get about 1.5Mbit inside my house too, which isn't bad considering my internet connection (also wireless) is only 256K.

Re:webgear cards are quite good

[elambrecht]

I've got to agree with that. The linux driver is
even better than the Windows driver, based on
my experience - it never crashes the OS. I've also
gotten my windows and linux machines to talk
via the cards.

At $150US for 2 pcmcia cards and 2 ISA/PCMCIA adaptors, you can't beat these suckers.

Re:webgear cards are quite good

[jawad]

http://www.buy.com/comp/product.as p?sku=10228293

It's cheaper ($138.95) from Buy.com (as opposed to $169.95), but it's back ordered. Does Slashdot have issue with buy.com?

Re:webgear cards are quite good

[jawad]

Why ISA? Why not PCI?

Re:webgear cards are quite good

[Nicholas Schumacher]

Why ISA?

Because the cards are all actually the PCMCIA cards - You use an ISA PCMCIA adapter to install them to a desktop machine. (I don't know of anyone making a PCI PCMCIA adapter - if there is one I'd like to know)


-Nick

Re:webgear cards are quite good

[jawad]

Unfortunately, newer motherboards don't even *have* ISA slots. Why should their owners suffer? What other alternatives do we have?

Re:webgear cards are quite good

[avm]

I'll second that. Good, relatively cheap depending on where you got them, drivers now in the current pcmcia-cs, and performance is not too shabby. I'd definitely recommend them for someone looking to setup a wireless way to surf from the couch/recliner/.

One potential caveat...no BSD driver support that I'm aware of. Also, how is the Aviator when plonked into another vendor's wireless IEEE-802.11 environment? Does it play nicely?

Re:webgear cards are quite good

[MarkKomus]

From what I know they're not aimed at ISA even, you can just get the adapter cards only in ISA. They're designed as PCMCIA cards because the devices that would benifit the most from wireless are small devices you want to carry around with you, which have PCMCIA slots.

Re:webgear cards are quite good

[Anonymous Coward]

#1 lesson of ecommerce: Never buy anything from Buy.com that's not in stock. You will receive flying pigs in the mail first.

Re:webgear cards are quite good

[bko]

Actually, netbsd imported support for these cards about a week ago:

http://www.netbsd.org/Changes/changes-1.5.html

(scroll on down to January 2000, section pcmcia)

Re:webgear cards are quite good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, their shitty MS SQL setup sucks ass.

Home Networking

[CoolHnd30]

One major advantage of wireless that I see is in Networking for the Home. It's a real pain to try to wire an older home for networking and try to make it look decent, as well as expensive in its own right. A wireless solution could hit it big in the burgeoning home networking market.

Re:Home Networking

[matticus]

it's not too difficult to network a home CAT5. it takes a little elbow grease, a hub(cheap now, maybe $20-30) and 100-200 feet of cat 5. I did our house over christmas break. hints-to make the drill holes smaller, crimp the rj-45 end on after stringing the cable. Use existing wires as guides. check the cable before stringing(it sucks to repull any length of wire), and learn to work that crimper! for a few extra bucks, you can cut patch panels and do a really good job. And, if your house is already wired cat5, as most are these days, you can often use the extra pairs off the phone jacks.
Right now, desktop wireless is not worth it. why? because you already have 8 cables coming off the back of your box. one more doesn't hurt. now for laptops, it makes much more sense.

Re:Home Networking

[grmoc]

I live in an apartment.

Its tough to wire up one of those...
(Management gets peeved =) )

Re:Home Networking

[lizrd]

I live in an apartment too. it's really not that bad to string up the whole place. We've got 14 networked machines among the 4 of us. I've got a DSL hookup in the living room, 2 8 port hubs in one bedroom and just a little bit of cat 5 running along the corners of the room. We bought some cable covers for about 8 bucks at radio shack so that's not even a problem.

All I can say is that the networked home thing is pretty darn sweet. The machine on the coffee table is cool. I can check www.tvguide.com and watch on the big screen all without moving an inch. Throw in a bit of X10 and it's really cool. Life is good.

Wiring a residence

[Cardinal]

I'm currently running 50 foot cat5 all over my house, which I had always planned on replacing with the proper in-wall solution; faceplates, a patch panel, etc.

However, since I would hire the labor done (I have no love for pulling cable into walls), I'm now wondering if it would be cheaper (Or even close enough in cost to justify saving the trouble and having the extra freedom) to simply go with a wireless solution.

So what's the deal? :) How much should I expect to pay per node, and would the setup require a central broadcast point, or can each node serve as a repeater?

Webgear

[CrAlt]

Ive been happy with the Webgear (Av 2Gz) wireless lan cards. They support Linux and I havnt had any problems with them. You can get 2 PCMCIA Wireless cards and 2 PCMCIA-to-ISA cards all for $140. Range is about 1000 feet outside and 500 inside. I think their site is www.webgear.com.

Sierra Wireless Aircard

[PsychoKiller]

The Sierra Wireless Aircard is a good card for laptops running Linux, they've even got a link on how to get it running under Linux on their web page.

Re:Sierra Wireless Aircard

[horsie]

Cool, now I wish I bought the Sierra, instead of my Novatel Merlin... which so far does not work with Linux...

The Merlin is a good card, but runs only under Windoze for the moment...

Emailed Novatel asking about Linux support, and they could not give me a definite answer. For those who are interested in the Merlin, check out http://www.novatelwireless.com. They also have the Omnisky wireless modem for Palm V users, which currently offers free unlimited usage during their beta period which is until the end of March 2000.

Mobile Linux

[lfd]

and the Crusoe processor probably need it badly if that processor is to be successful in palmtops...

Re:Mobile Linux

[el_nino]

The Crusoe processor emulates an x86 processor. You don't anything made for the Crusoe except Motherboard, BIOS and stuff.

%japh = (
'name' => 'Niklas Nordebo', 'mail' => 'niklas@' . 'nordebo.com',
'work' => 'www.sonox.com', 'phone' => '+46-708-405095'

Breezecom works quite fine as well

[jum]

I have been using a Breezecom access point with the PCMCIA card the Breezecom folks did OEM from Raytheon. This works quite fine, thanks to the fine driver from Corey Thomas. For their own PCMCIA card a Linux driver is in testing and supposed to show up on their web site in a few days.

It is a bit on the pricey side, but is very convenient.

Re:Breezecom works quite fine as well

[aap]

How much is "pricey?" The WebGear Aviator2.4 which everyone here likes is also an OEM version of the Raytheon RayLink, but it's much cheaper... I paid `$140 at CompUSA for the 2-card kit. Online most shops seem to want >$300 for one card from Raytheon.

Most current distros don't include the driver, but it is in the 2.3 kernels, so eventually life will get easier. Meanwhile, it can be installed without too much trouble. Linux to Windows networking works like a charm... I'm typing this on a Win98 laptop connected via WebGear & ipchains through my linux desktop machine. (Of course both machines have Win98 and Linux-Mandrake 7.0, but at the moment...)

WebGear even provides the Linux driver on their Web site. I had better luck with the one on the author's web site, though.

Two words: Lanparty Barbecue

[Cardinal]

That's what I'm looking into wireless for. I want to be able to bring laptops out onto my back deck and enjoy a good Internet-accessible barbecue.

zoomair cards

[Mandrake]

I have zoomair wireless networking set up both at home and at work and I love it. nothing like going out to the pool to hack on a nice day.
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)

Re:zoomair cards

[dattaway]

These zoomair cards have real possibilities. No more dongles to break. I'm up the street at a friends house on my notebook typing through an X forwarded netscape on it now.

The only problem I had was the range. It only worked for about a block. So, I took the directional antennas off my X10 cams and patched them in. I had to take one of the cards apart to find out how to do it since no jack was available. Turns out a provision for a jack was on the circuit board layout, but not implimented. So, I notched the case at the end where the "Z" is on the zoomair logo, notched out some more plastic to move the "zero-ohm jumper" over from the internal antena to my new external. I epoxied the swivel mount of the miniture X10 directional antenna at the end. I wish I had my camera here to snap a shot as it looks pretty sharp. Anyhow, the range is spectacular. I was driving around town with it and only dropped a few ping packets.

Now I need to talk to my ISP and motivate them to set up a base station. :)

WaveLAN Cards have source available too

[Anonymous Coward]

I've gotten the source drivers for the PCMCIA kernel distribution from www.wavelan.com. I've only been using a 6Mb card, but it works better under Linux than it does under Windows (one driver under Linux works for them all while under Windows it takes 3-4, go figure).

-gordon

The next step above a 'wireless LAN'

[tidepool]

Although having a wireless LAN is _very_ neat and geekworthy, the l0pht have been working on a wireless project now for a few years. (Yes, it's usually on the back burner, but according to the L0pht / @stake merger FAQ they are going to hopefully put more efforts and funding into the project.

The project is called guerrilla.net. While most of the 'work' has yet to be done, they have set up a list of goals and ideals for the future - A very important step before such an interesting project takes place on a larger scale.

I know I would personally like to get involved in something similar to this; having a wireless 'intranet' of sorts (complete with 'gateways' to the _real_ internet) would 'tickle my pickle' quite well.

E-mail me if you are as interested in this as I am.

Ben Brewer
brewer@nullified.org

Proxim

[antrod]

I've got a Proxim Symphony network that works across all of my family's houses and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get my Sony VAIO 505 to run the card under Linux. Binary module is available and with the exception of APM which screws up the card when you suspend/resume the laptop it works as well if not better than W95.

Re:Proxim

[Tim Petty]

Antrod, Could you tell me how you set up your Symphony card under Linux? I am trying to do that ona Redhat 5.2 system and can't get it working. Thanks!

I like the Proxim

[anewsome]

I just installed a Proxim Wireless Ethernet Bridge and a single computer with a wirless PCI card, running Windows.

I worked out so slick that I am considering buying an access point for home and buying a PCMCIA card for my laptop, running Linux. However, it seems like finding someone who has used the pcmcia card under linux might be harder than it sounds.

If anyone has used this card under Linux, I'd like to hear about it.

Re:I like the Proxim

[AMessyRoom]

I'm using a proxim pcmcia card under linux
to send this reply; i'm using v1.5.1 of the linux
driver available from http://www.komacke.com

there is also a mailing list for users of the
driver

I believe the latest version of the driver is 1.5.3

Why is wireless networking tied to [OS] market?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does it matter? Wireless networking xmitters should understand ethernet packets. They should not care what OS is producing them.

Because of the OS independence of ethernet, I believe it would have been a better choice than USB as a peripheral bus. If packaged ethernet PCI cards can sell new for $8, then the ethernet chipset can't be all that expensive to stat building into printers, scanners, etc. And TCP/IP has more than enough address space to handle your CPUs devices (periph bus being separate from inet bus). And ethernet is faster than USB (that same sub $8 chipset does 100 megabit). But ethernet is not Intel's baby like USB is, so it'll be build onto mboards to the detriment of all that is better. Firewire never had a chance except maybe in the Mac world.

Re:Why is wireless networking tied to [OS] market?

[grmoc]

From a technical standpoint this would be icky icky. First of all, ethernet doesn't allow synchronous data xferrs, like both Firewire and USB, nor does it allow isosynchronous transmission... Nope, ethernet is asynchronous, and that isn't good for a bus that needs synchronous capabilities! (The ability to do all three is what makes firewire and USB neat.) And USB-2 will be around 400MB/sec...(supposedly, I believe that it is still a draft-standard) (And this throughput isn't effected nearly as much by traffic as Ethernet is.. Expect a max utilization of around 40% with ethernet (thats pushing it!) USB (being mostly synchronous) does better.) That being said, USB is like early mainframe protocols in that it is asymetric with respect to control of the medium.. Ethernet is not.. (which is why ethernet is good for peer-peer connections, while USB wouldn't handle more than one master well (it'd break. So sorry. =) ))

Re:Why is wireless networking tied to [OS] market?

[uradu]

Well, one of the biggest reasons for why you don't see ethernet peripherals is the overhead of packet processing. Your $8 ethernet card is only the beginning of a long journey through one or more protocol stacks--TCP/IP, IPX etc. TCP/IP in particular is a very demanding protocol to process, so in addition to the ethernet chipset you need pretty much an entire computer to do all the processing. In the past that was technologically simply unfeasible, and while some manufacturers did sell such devices (HP's JetDirect for example), the cost was prohibitive for more trivial devices, or low margin devices.

Nowadays we're getting to where an entire TCP/IP stack can be embedded in a chipset and can be combined with an ethernet chipset for not very much. At the other end you simply supply a serial bitstream pretty much, and don't have to worry about the details. However, for the kinds of applications you're talking about, this technological advance is simply too late. We already have USB etc, so ethernet printers are not really necessary for the low end anymore. However, a lot more devices WILL show up on IP networks, stuff you'd have never expected on a network. It's all about this craze to connect every electronic gizmo via IP. It won't be too long before you can buy light switches with their own IP address (v6 probably), at what prices I don't want to know. Talk about DOS attacks on your light switch when you want to catch some sleep.

wireless how-to

[Anonymous Coward]

there is a low cost wireless how-to at www.qsl.net/n9zia

Aviator WebGear 2.4 cards-the best value

[TurkishGeek]

I've been using Aviator Webgear 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11 cards for a while. You can buy a 2-pack for only $139.99 at the nearest CompUSA; and the kit includes 2 ISA adapters as well as the two PCMCIA cards. They work great with Linux, too. I recommend Aviator 2.4 cards to everyone instead of proprietary stuff like Diamond HomeFree; which do not work with Linux at all(well not really, but the drivers work in a non-FCC approved way and can't talk to Windows drivers)

Now that we have affordable IEEE 802.11 cards that work with Linux, I guess the next step is to have IEEE 802.11 access point capability for Linux. I guess having an access point is the easiest way to bridge seamlessly between an Ethernet and wireless; I did not have the time to deal with finding an alternative solution; so my wireless LAN is just another segment with its own non-routable class C; and I use masquerading at the gateway. I've been checking out the Absolute Value site for a while, but they seem to be concentrating on cards with the Intersil chipset.





--

BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Re:Aviator WebGear 2.4 cards-the best value

[mindstrm]

Linux, with kernel bridging should do the trick.

Aviator WebGear 2.4 is 70$/card

[TurkishGeek]

Check out my post about the Aviator WebGear 2.4, which is IEEE 802.11 compatible (2Mb/s). At $139.99 for a 2-card kit (at CompUSA), it is a very good value. Works with Linux like a charm, problem-free (on both laptops on desktops with the included ISA PCMCIA adapters).

Once you go wireless, there really is no going back.
--

BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Re:Aviator WebGear 2.4 is 70$/card

[Perlguy]

I also have the aviator and this thing reallu kicks ass! I have it in a RH 5.2 box and a RH 6.1 laptop.

It is inexpensive, and truly amazing! Get one!

...

Re:Aviator WebGear 2.4 is 70$/card

[youngsd]

I got the Webgear kit (2 cards) for about $150. I had a little trouble getting it to work at first, but once I got the newest version of the driver, I was flying wireless! For anyone out there who is married to a spouse that resents how much time you spend on the computer, a laptop with a wireless card is the way to go. I can sit in the living room (or anywhere else in the house) with my wife and chat while connected (wirelessly) to my Athlon and the internet. Now my wife can't complain that I'm always in the computer room.

-Steve

Re:Aviator WebGear 2.4 is 70$/card

[Anonymous Coward]

I got it for $140 LESS $40 rebate at CompUSA.. total of $100 for the PAIR! Its a good card, I installed it on my laptop so I can connect to my desktop, which is on cable modem... Highly recommended, but the driver parameters need tweaking, have fun! go get it... JondZ

Re:Aviator WebGear 2.4 is 70$/card

[ANTI]

Good.

Does anyone have an address where I can buy them in europe ?

Preferably Germany or UK.

And _online_ !!

thanks
Anti

Re:Aviator WebGear 2.4 is 70$/card

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the way technology is enhancing our lifes :-)

Next Step

[cliffhanger]

Portability as has been mentioned in a previous article is quickly gaining popularity. Especially with all the recent tech advances supporting it, for example Transmeta's new chip. The purpose of a laptop is portability and flexibility. Portability is to a laptop as flexibility is to Linux. So Wireless ethernet and linux are not only good, but the next necessary step in computers today.

WaveLan, Breezecom

[Tom7]

We're using the Lucent WaveLan stuff here at CMU.

I've only used it under windows (no real good reason for my vaio to be running linux), but it's quite nice and performs really well. The software that comes with it is really cool -- you can see graphs of the network reliability, remember other users by their MAC address so you can see who else is using it near you, etc. We're not running encryption right now, which is somewhat tragic, but the WaveLan silver stuff apparently supports 56-bit DES. I've heard that it works well under linux, and have seen many machines running it.

We sell the breezecom stuff at work -- it's more expensive but boasts some nice features. They claim they can get 5 miles out of one station adapter -- which would be enough for me to connect to work's T1 from home! No idea about the linux drivers situation for this stuff.

Lucent makes the nicest-looking wireless equipment that I've seen, too (no ugly antennas!). Breezecom's hardware appears very amateurish (reminds me of a Commodore 64 or something).

- Tom 7

Re:WaveLan, Breezecom

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of CMU, the wireless deployment at CMU is documented at http://www.cmu.edu/computing/wireless. Last we heard, CMU has the largest 802.11 wireless deployment to date.

As other people have noted, handheld devices are a good fit for wireless and there is a project underway to deploy this on campus.

Re:WaveLan, Breezecom

[Keeper ofthe Keys]

Breezecom hardware is absolutely beautiful. I have a 1/2 mile link running 2mbps off of indoor antennas!
One's on the 2nd floor of our current building, stuck with masking tape to a window, and the others hanging on a board out of the 3rd floor window of our new building. There's a mall in between, and it works wonderfully!

(for anyone who doesn't know RF, this is just about the worst possible way to connect it, I should have climbed onto the roof, would have gotten much better signal but hey, it worked first time)

The side benefit of this is I can sit in Tim Hortons across the street, sit down to drink coffee and still be on the office LAN!

hoo-ah!

Wireless Internet in Southern Ontario available NOW. WDSL Inc.

Wireless WebPad - Killer App for Transmeta WebPads

[WillAffleck]

As scott__ said to me today, having a web pad is interesting, but having a wireless modem for a Linux-based Transmeta chip web pad is really interesting.

This is something that people will buy for their homes, as well as for their offices. When a car dealer can carry around the pad and order it for you on the lot - that's web-enabled data entry. When your doctor can run the web front end for the medical database in the secure internal wireless LAN in the clinic and update your data while giving you a check up - that's interesting.

When I can undock the web pad from the fridge or TV holder and start the bath, turn on the outside lights, check the web cam from my son's room, look at his homework chart from the school (darn, he has one of those silly papers due!), see that my Cisco stock is at $562 a share at the limit I set to sell some, sell the stock in the aftermarket, transfer the funds to my credit card, set Expedia for Linux searching for cheap fares to Hawaii, and cook dinner - now you're talking!

easy way to load music to your car.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been waiting for something reasonable so that I can wire up my car with a broken laptop (broken screen) to be an mp3 player and be able to transfer music to the car. Much better than bringing in the laptop or pulling cat 5 to the garage. heck, it's even better than just keeping a collection of mp3 cds on board. just park the car at home and it's networked. hey.. more ideas.. upload gps information, upload map info, track mileage, gas consumption, etc... i'm getting carried away. one problem i forsee... people breaking into your car with a computer.

Re:easy way to load music to your car.

[yesod]

There are people producing MP3 players for cars.
Checkout http://www.empeg.com for some very sexy
gear.

One of those - with a PCMCIA slot for wireless
ethernet would be superb. Wireless USB a close
second.

Re:easy way to load music to your car.

[frog51]

Seriously - go check out Empeg.
It is exactly what you need. Linux device the size of a car stereo with up to 490 minutes of mp3 songs. Blue display - has plugins like geiss for winamp - matches my Golf GTI turbo dashboard.

Smooth!!!

Wireless break down.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have worked with wireless, I have used the Breezecom, Lucent WaveLAN, and Solectek Corp. wireless, and I am happy with the results, in so far as a solution for a remote site, but when you are dealing with 900 mhz, the licensed MMDS band (2.500 to 2.690 GHz), or unlicensed U-NII band (5.725 to 5.825 GHz). You have to realize that those are all microwave, or in the case of the 900mhz almost microwave frequencies. Now I may be paranoid but a microwave has heavy layers of sheilding that stop the propagation of radiation, but these things have antennas that help propogate radiation and you stick a card in your laptop and set it on your lap. I don't know. It's just to creapy for me, also the latency of microwave wireless over a relitivly short distance is far to much to get any good voice over ip, or do anything that is time sensitive, I.E. q3 and such. It's a good choice for some instances, like browsing the net, chatting, or e-mail, but don't think it can give you everything that your lan can.

Re:Wireless break down.

[mindstrm]

The problem here is not with the radiation, but the definition of 'Microwave'.
'Microwave' is a generic term used to describe basically *everything* from about 2Ghz (maybe even 1Ghz.. I forget) to about 30 Ghz (where you get into millimeter wave).
This spectrum covers a *huge* range of radio properties... it's not like you are desribing some tiny band.. like LF, HF, VHF, UHF, etc...
That said, you are correct.
Many Wireless LAN devices operate in the 2.4Ghz ISM band.
Microwave ovens typically work at 2.45Ghz.

The main difference, of course, is power.

Proxim RangeLan II, 2.4Ghz ISM, approx. 100mW.
Microwave oven, 2.45Ghz: Approx. 600 W.

So.. your microwave oven uses the same frequencies, roughly.. but at 6000 times higher power.

Also.. all that junk about microwave ovens heating water molecules by using 'specific resonant frequencies' is bunk. They do it by applying large amounts of power, period.


Now.. to address your latency issues...
My friend, the latency for wireless is no different than through copper. Radio waves through air travel *faster* than signal through copper (not that it would be measurable without sophisticated equipment, or large distances).
There is no latency associated with wireless.
People do voice over satellite.. what.. do you think that's not latency? that's 1/4 second up, 1/4 second down, and the saem in revers.. 1 second RTT simply to geostationary orbit and back. And it uses microwave.. just the same.

Hmm. Perhaps you are a troll?
Perhaps we need to play q3.. I'll use my wireless internet connection, (2.4Ghz ISM DSSS product) and you use whatever you want, and I'll still win :)





Microwave works

Re:Wireless break down.

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind the power levels. Wireless cards transmit on the order of milliwatts to 0.5 watts. Microwave ovens typically have 1000 watts or more. A factor of 10 is a big jump, here were talking at least 1000 times the difference.

Re:Wireless break down.

[dattaway]

Latency... My zoomair gets 8ms ping times, while connections through my 10Mbs hub yields unmeasurable 0.0ms ping times. I suppose the 8ms through the wireless is due to the way the packets are modulated and then processed. The lag time is noticable when opening up a new X forwarded Netscape, say 10 seconds over the wireless is much longer than 2 seconds through the cable. But I forgive latency as mobility is a luxury. :)

Re:Wireless break down.

[Tom7]

The latency of our WaveLan system is much better than I expected, actually. I don't know if you can play Quake3 (my laptop does not have a 3D card ;)) but I don't think voice-over-ip is unreasonable. My ssh sessions respond just as quickly as they do on the lan.

- Tom 7

Re:Wireless break down.

[wik]

This is probably just a configuration issue, but with my Lucent WaveLAN Silver, I get variable pings (to hosts one or two router-hops away, on campus) of 10 - 110ms. I happen to have the sleep-on-idle power saving features on, so I'm guessing that the card takes a little nap and that's what causes this. Anyway, it has caused me no grief running Xemacs and and other X apps from my linux box in the dorm.

Re:Wireless break down.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cops get testicular cancer from their radar guns. Not sure of the frequency or power though

Re:Wireless break down.

[Keeper ofthe Keys]

You should be afraid of microwave ovens, not ISM band wireless lan cards:

Microwave oven: 600-1000W*
Typical WLAN Card: 100mW

*Legally, according to regulating gov't bodies, a microwave oven can LEAK 1 full WATT of power out its gaskets in the home ... that's 10 times what a wireless card will put out PEAK

People helping the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Good gravy goofballs, man, why would you want to make it easier for the gov't (or anyone for that matter) to spy on you. It's as bad as people who install 'baby monitors' in their home. I can pick these up on the scanner and hear sounds throughout the house. Maybe someone will hack your ethernet security code and surf the net and download pr0n on your nickel.

Re:People helping the NSA

[CoolHnd30]

hmmmmmmm, I hadn't thought about that issue. That really is going to have to be a seriously considered issue before use of these products become to widespread.

Re:People helping the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever. Use a good encryption protocol when connecting. You are just as vulnerable from people snooping on the airwaves as ethernet.

Re:People helping the NSA

[Tom7]

You're more vulnerable, actually, since you don't need to be physically plugged into the wire (yes, I know you can also do some sort of inductance trick to listen in on ethernet without being on the wire, but I've never seen it done).

Fortunately, the WaveLan silver card ships with 56-bit encryption built in! It's not NSAproof, but it certainly would stop script kiddies. This card costs about $260.

A worse security problem is denial of service attacks; it's too easy to disrupt the signal if you're trying.

Re:People helping the NSA

[jpugh]

you've got to be kidding...it's far easier to tap your phone than it would be to tap into a 2g wireless transmission...especially if you are using FHSS. be for real.

Re:People helping the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

the lucent cards have encryption. the gold ones have 128 bit.

Re:People helping the NSA

[Cato]

Luckily encryption issues have already been sorted out to implement virtual private networks over the Internet. See my post earlier at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/02/01/16522 10&cid=215 for details of how you might use IPSec for this.

One slightly odd implication is that the WLAN is a public network, so it should really be connected to the outside of your home firewall - otherwise you have to carefully IPSEC every host in your home, even the wired-only ones. Or you make the WLAN gateway into another firewall, but why have two firewalls?

Webgear here too

[True Dork]

and I love em. I detailed how they're set up on our silly little YALP on the webpage. I've been using the kernel bridging to connect to the LAN because I dont want to route YET another subnet. Only problem is I'm getting very very slow speeds across the bridge. I was just told today to try a replacement bridge, so I'll give that a shot. While 802.11 access points would be nice, bridging should be sufficient (at least for me).

Re:Webgear here too

[Zachary DeAquila]

>While 802.11 access points would be nice, bridging should be sufficient (at least for me).

Uhm, what do you think an 802.11 AP is, but a bridge between the wireless and wired interfaces?

In the words of Nakor, 'There is no magic.'

--Z

Re:Webgear here too

[True Dork]

I was under the impression it affected the way the devices spoke to each other given that there is an 'ad hoc' and 'infrastructure' mode for the cards. If I get it, the infrastructure mode only talks to the AP and sees other wireless clients through the AP and ad-hoc speaks directly from station to station with no AP involved. Yes, it's a bridge, but I think the cards have to know about it. Maybe I'm wrong... I think I've been wrong before :P

Re:Webgear here too

[Zachary DeAquila]

Good point; I had forgotten the Adhoc/Infrastructure mode bit. OTOH, I know from experience that the APs are just embedded boards that themselves contain a wireless card; it's just a matter of flipping the right mode bit on the card. I've actually heard of people turning 2Mbps APs into 11Mbps APs by upgrading the cards and the AP firmware (lesse, $200 for the card plus free firmware upgrade vs. $1700(at the time) for a new 11Mbps AP vs. $400 to get a 'factory' upgrade... which of these would YOU pick?)

So you're right, it's a bit more than making just a bridge, but not much more, and certainly nothing you shouldn't be able to do on a linux box...

--Z

Re:Webgear here too

[Andy Dodd]

Can you have more than 2 cards on a network w/o an AP?

And are the Aviator cards compatible with AirPort?

Re: Webgear here too

[fordan]

>>>>> "Dork" == True Dork writes:

Dork> I was under the impression it affected the way the devices Dork> spoke to each other given that there is an 'ad hoc' and Dork> 'infrastructure' mode for the cards. If I get it, the Dork> infrastructure mode only talks to the AP and sees other Dork> wireless clients through the AP and ad-hoc speaks directly Dork> from station to station with no AP involved. Yes, it's a Dork> bridge, but I think the cards have to know about it. Maybe Dork> I'm wrong... I think I've been wrong before :P

It certainly does seem to make a difference... It doesn't look like you can use the WEP encryption in ad-hoc/non-access-point mode, which makes it somewhat less desirable. You could always use IPSEC, but that's a bit of a pain.

Bob

--
Robert Snyder rsnyder@toontown.erial.nj.us
ICQ #20900813

Re:Webgear here too

[TurkishGeek]

>Can you have more than 2 cards on a network w/o >an AP?

You can have up to 60 nodes. I have 4 on my home network and 11 at work; without an access point.

>And are the Aviator cards compatible with >AirPort?

Aviator 2.4 cards work at 2Mb/s; whereas the AirPort is 11Mb/s; but they're both IEEE 802.11 and yes, they should work together in theory. Some IEEE 802.11 cards use frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) as opposed to direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS); and I guess Aviator 2.4 is one of the former. I have used Aviator 2.4 cards with Lucent WaveLAN IEEE cards; and since AirPort uses the WaveLAN circuitry; I suppose they must work.

Beware: WebGear has an older line of products called the Aviator-they are not IEEE 802.11 compatible. The IEEE 802.11 product is called Aviator 2.4, referring to the frequency band. I've seen some people jump on the Aviator cards on Ebay or elsewhere on several occasions; only to find out they are old, lame proprietary technologies.

--

BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Re:Webgear here too

[True Dork]

Aviator PRO's should work too.

Re:Webgear here too

[Andy Dodd]

OK, thanks. I wasn't worried about the speed too much, but the possibility of compatibility in any manner. Sounds cool. I work at the campus store here - we might get a few cards for stock and test one with our AirPort setup.

Survey from Spring

[Bryan Andersen]

I did a survey from spring 99 that was aimed at robotics use. At that time I saw it as a good possibility. It can only have improved sense then. I eventually plan to use them for linking to my robot and a wearable computer.

Wireless is coming

[Anonymous Coward]

Wireless is coming in a big way. First 802.11 got stable, then supported by major chip vendors, then Apple announced integration in the iBook. I suspect by the end of the year it will be one of the things you could never had dreamed of living without. The ability to walk into any airport and many hotels in the US and get cheap wireless net will help get it out there.

Personally, at work I use an Aironet (now owned by Cisco) 4800 card (under linux) and have had no problems. Some chorts of mine are currently setting up a point to point wireless conection with yaggis on the end of the same wireless cards in PCI carriers - seems the local carrier couldn't deliver a T1 fast enough, but there was no problem getting roof access...

Expect to see 11Mbps cards in the ~$100 price range soonish, with slightlylower prices for 2Mbps versions (based on older chipsets)

Around the same time, expect to see 'cable-modem-top' boxes that integrate a wireless bridge into a hub that you can plug your cable modem into in order to get portable net in your house.

All of this is for 100meterish-range wireless.

For closer range expect to see Bluetooth moving into all the places IRDA tried to go with only marginal success. Walkup printing, PDA access, even wireless headphones. It's too cheap and robust to fail.

For longer ranges, well, there's some work going on to use the cellular network for packet data, but here big companies and big money get in the way of the quick innovation that is needed for technologies to be tried fast enough to find a workable solution.

--Xandir

Re:Wireless is coming

[mindstrm]

100 Meter band?
Most 802.11 cards I've seen are 900Mhz (918 orwhatever ISM band is..) or 2.4Ghz (ISM again).

2.4Ghz is about 15 cm.. not 100 Meter...no?

Re:Wireless is coming

[mindstrm]

100 Meter band?
Most 802.11 cards I've seen are 900Mhz (918 orwhatever ISM band is..) or 2.4Ghz (ISM again).

2.4Ghz is about 15 cm.. not 100 Meter...no?
Wouldn't 100 Meter be down below VHF?

Also.. cdpd (cellular packet data) is closer than you think.. many cellular providers already have their cdpd networks deployed... but that serves a different market.

Re:Wireless is coming

[Anonymous Coward]

He said 100M-range, not band :)

Security

[goodie]

Nobody has said anything here (yet) about the security of wireless LAN cards. If I run a tape backup across my LAN can someone sit outside my house and scoop it all up?

Re:Security

[Zachary DeAquila]

>Nobody has said anything here (yet) about the security of wireless LAN cards. If I run a tape backup across my LAN can someone sit outside my house and scoop it all up?

Pretty much. Minor security in the form of an SSID that will keep the naive user from connecting to your net (it's really a way to run multiple wireless subnets that overlap), but nothing to stop the sophisticated user. Tcpdump works fine. So SSH is your friend. But of course the Men In Black have Tempest technology.

--Z

Re:Security

[jjo]

Well, the Webgear Aviator Pro (which I love, adding to the chorus of approval here) has both the SSID and 40-bit encryption. Probably nothing to stop a _really_ dedicated and sophisticated eavesdropper, but enough to foil the teenager cruising around the neighborhood with his laptop.

Re:Security

[Zachary DeAquila]

Sounds good. Of course, that kills interoperability somewhat in that I can't just bring my laptop over and be on your LAN, unless you give me the key. So not bad for home users, but maybe not what you want to put into all your field offices unless you *like* teaching salesdroids to rekey their wireless cards.

My only problem with the webgear stuff is that it's FH, not DS ; only the DS stuff will go 11Mbps... plus the DS stuff is what we've got at the office :)

--Z

Re:Security

[mindstrm]

TCPDump works fine depending on the card in use.
It depends on the layer 2 protocol used on the radio side. In 802.11, this may be the case.
not all wireless lan cards use 802.11 (and certainly, many that do use 802.11 are not interoperable; 802.11 applies to several bands.).
Proxim, for one.. you can't just sniff on those cards. won't work. The driver (currently) doesn't support it, and I believe the firmware in the proxim radio (that determines how the protocol actually works) doesn't allow it... but proxim doesnt' use a CSMA/CA method.. they use a more detailed protocol where each host has to ask for permission to transmit to it's destination.... and other cards ignore.

Re:Security

[frog51]

Nope - if you go with direct sequence (eg aironet) you can't even see the signal above ambient rf noise. If you can see it you still need the chipping code (up to 63 bits) before you can reconstruct the signal and then you can run 3 levels of encryption over that (as default).

Hack that?? I think not! Why do you think the army developed it?

all cards are not equal...

[Anonymous Coward]

about the WebGear Aviator Cards --
interoperability of any 802.11 card is dependent on _which_ 802.11 spec the card conforms to...

for example, the WebGear cards run a FHSS (frequency hopping spread spectrum) access technique, where the Lucent cards (and AirPort and all other cards with the Harris/Intersil PRISM II chipset) use DSSS (direct sequence spread spectrum), which has its roots in Qualcomm's CDMA technology.

and then you get to decide on 1Mbps, 2Mbps, 11Mbps, and WEP encryption schemes and such...

i have not come upon a card or a basestation that knows how to speak both DSSS and FHSS. in shopping for a new wireless home network, it might be in your best interest to see what you're running at work, or what your buddy is running, so that you buy something compatible.

on a side note, has anyone seen a Lucent card in an ISA or PCI carrier? CDW has started offering the WaveLan silver again, but still without the carrier.

TIA
brian whitaker
applications engineer, maxim
bwhitake@knarf.com

Re:all cards are not equal...

[Anonymous Coward]

wait wait... both with the Lucent cards and the Nortel product, you can CHOOSE between whether you want to use DS or FH

Re:all cards are not equal...

[Anonymous Coward]

i beleive the lucent and nortel cards are capable of doing either DS or FS, actually with nortel cards, the 650 series does DS, while 660 does FS. i'm pretty sure the lucent cards can do both FS and DS and is enabled in the software that comes with it..

Does IEEE 802.11 mean they all play well together

[specht]

I've just done a quick search on the web, but was not able to come up with an answer to my question: When two different manufacturers label their products as 802.11 complient, does this mean that I can use them together (as long as the frequency is the same, e.g. 2.4GHz)?

And here is another one: When I buy a card in the US, will I be able to connect to lets say the European version?

Wireless Cards for the Home!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a distributor in Canada and I see a great push for Lucent WAVELAN cards. The prices are coming down, making them very affordable for the home user.

I like WaveLAN because the AccessPoint can have 2 slots for PCMCIA cards. doubling your bandwidth.

I've seen the Nortel product, Baystack 650 and 660. Which are 1 MB and 2MB respectively. Nortel is coming out with the 670 soon, which is their 11MB version - 802.11 compliant.

By far, I like the Lucent product because there is encryption available for it. You can also get a pci/isa card for your desktop and make that wireless, or you can even make a printer wireless with another device I forget that that is called.

peace out

Lucent Cards- How much and where to buy?

[gatzke]

Where can you get the fast wireless Lucent cards?

How much are they for the different speeds?

I have seen people saying Lucent makes 8Mbs and 11Mbs. Is this true?

Do you need 1 card and a port? How much is that?

Can you get by with 2 pc cards, 1 in a non-mobile laptop attached to a ground line?

What is the range?

Thanks for the info-

Ed

Re:Lucent Cards- How much and where to buy?

[yuriwho]

Where can you get the fast wireless Lucent cards?

Check out wavelan for resellers and more info

How much are they for the different speeds?

I bought a silver (11 Mbs) PCMCIA card (medium security 40 bit? encryption) for $170

Do you need 1 card and a port? How much is that?

Im not sure how much their access points are but I got an Apple Airport (uses wavelan silver technology) for $299. It has ethernet and phone jacks and serves as a simple router with NAT and port mapping

Can you get by with 2 pc cards, 1 in a non-mobile laptop attached to a ground line?

Yes but not properly on Apples yet, Apple claims they will soon release an airport software base station. I guess they are waiting for people to buy up all the airports before they release the software to turn any mobile with a card into a basestation. You can currently do computer to computer with apples now but not with DHCP and NAT. I think the software is avail for wintel and linux to turn any card into a router but I'm not completely sure

What is the range?

~150 foot sphere through typical housing construction, further through air.

Wireless

[mindstrm]

Having used both Proxim Rangelan II, and several versions of Lucent WaveLan (all pcmcia cards) in linux, I didn't have to many problems.

Neither has full source, you need a binary-only module (or in the case of the proxim driver, a library that you link against, I believe built from the Proxim reference source.) The Proxim driver was a bit bitchy in it's early days, but I'm told it works very well now.

Another note... most wireless LAN solutions have some kind of 'base station' or 'access point' they expect you to buy. If all you have is a few PC's, and it's for the home hacker, you generally do not need this. The cards themselves can communicate with each other just fine. The base station usually serves as the bridge (possibly router) between your wired and wireless networks, sometimes with added features like supporitng multiple transcievers on multiple channels.

Another trick with wireless LAN cards.. if you replace the omnidirectional antenna they give you with a good directional antenna, you can massively extend the range. I have seen Proxim Rangelan II cards bridge distances of about 15 Km and still be within regulations. This also works if you have a wall you need to penetrate that you can't quite manage without. (depends on the materials, though..).
Also.. most wireless LAN cards, by regulation, must use a non-standard connector. Usually, it's a standard connector with the mating parts switched around. (this is to prevent joe average from hookingn his little card up to his linear amplifier and causing WW-III).

Hmm. I could go on for a while.. perhaps I should start a Wireless LAN HAcking FAQ?

Re:Does IEEE 802.11 mean they all play well togeth

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, theoretically speaking, since all the cards are 802.11 compliant, a Nortel PCMCIA card can work with a Lucent AccessPoint. I've yet to try it out, hopefully within the next month or so.

Re:Does IEEE 802.11 mean they all play well togeth

[Zachary DeAquila]

802.11 doesn't specify FH (Frequency Hopping) or DS (Direct Sequencing). DS is what's taking over.

And yes, you also have to pay attention that the frequency is the same (2.4GHz is standard now)

And since the I in IEEE (the standards body that specified 802.11) stands for 'International', I sure hope you can connect with European versions :)

--Z

Wireless to ISP

[Strog]

My local ISP wants to experiment with a wireless connection. I'm looking for something with a 3 or 4 mile range. Does anyone know of any good solutions for under a grand?

Re:Wireless to ISP

[mindstrm]

www.waverider.com (shameless plug for my employer)

Range like this is generally directional, especially with unlicensed products. Usually requires line of sight as well.

You will not find a product that will give you a 3 or 4 mile radius, and any kind of bandwidth for under a grand. Not even for 10 grand. Especially unlicensed.
Even if such a product were available for $100,000 (for the base station, at the ISP), they would already be all over the place.

Re:Wireless to ISP

[alhaz]

it's not *just* line of sight. It gets tricker than simply being able to see someone flash a mirror at you from a long way away.

after having problems with an Aironet bridge, the company i work for finally got ahold of someone who knew what he was doing, who explained the physics and showed us the math to the effect that at 2.4 ghz we needed a 40 foot wide corridor from end to end, over a 7 mile span. Which simply wasn't happening. anything in the way - like a branch of a tree, or a telephone pole, will send the signals scattering.

we installed a 23ghz, licensed frequency WinNet bridge (unfortunate name, great hardware) that needs more like a 12 foot corridor, which is working perfectly.

however, neither of these are exactly low-cost solutions.

Much success with Lucent WaveLAN cards outdoors.

[cyan]

Here at work, we recently (two weeks ago) implemented a four-block wireless shot direct from our main office, and it works like a charm. We used two Linux machines as the routers, with the PCMCIA-cs modules loaded along with the "wlan2" module which is available from Lucent here. The WaveLAN "silver" 2.4mbit cards were used on an ISA-PCMCIA bridge.

We got a professional communications company to run up antennas on towers on both sides of the shot, and it's great, no problems at all. We commonly get 5ms roundtrip times, and can push well over 1.6mbit (200Kb/sec), 0% packet loss, and the weather makes no difference from what we can see (and we've been through some heavy snowfall and rain already). As for the technical setup, in all honesty, any competent sysadmin should be able to set up such a connection in a snap -- it's that easy.

If it's a long outdoor wireless shot (as opposed to wireless for an indoors network only), you might be able to go out and climb onto a tower and do it on your own, but there are companies which exist to do that (antenna installation, pointing, etc) already. Then again, if you're trying to save cash, and want to hook up your friend a block or two away into your cable (or *DSL) connection via masq or whatever, then I suppose you could do that :)

However, it's not like this stuff is cheap, the cards are commonly $200cdn or so, with the antennas being just as much. Low-loss cable for the antenna is expensive, too. There are a lot of things to factor in, but all in all, it's all pretty cool stuff :)

It's great to see more and more companies supporting wireless on Linux, though, as it means not only will we get more robust drivers, but installation will be easier, and support will be broader. Of course, it should be obvious that anyone using wireless for the same thing we did (i.e. linking up two networks across a few blocks, or even kilometers away), they'll be using anything but Win* to do the routing work for the greatest amount of stability.

Wireless, Portables, and Cost.

[Cef]

Wireless is insanely useful for the portable market. Portable devices that aren't tethered by a cable are becoming more and more prominent in the workplace. The cost however is somewhat justified (note that I said somewhat - read below).

There is a lot of processing power in those little cards to implement the IEEE 802.11 spread spectrum model. They're not cheap for that very reason. Plus you don't have as huge a cable infrastructure, which is a cost most places forget about.

There are on average about 3-4 times as many components/transistors on a wireless card as there are on a comparable network card. You also have to remember that almost all PCI/ISA wireless cards are really a PCMCIA card in a PCMCIA adapter. Compare the cost of a PCMCIA network card to a PCMCIA wireless card and the difference isn't as great as it first seemed.

Why stick with PCMCIA and use adaptors? Well for a start, developing 2 cards in completely different technologies tends to take way too much time, and leads to revision problems. Add to this that the greatest market for wireless is actually portable devices that have PCMCIA slots, and you can see the economics that cause the choice.

However, I'd still like to see a Compact Flash version of these (and using a CF to PCMCIA adaptor, you can still stick with one version), even if it sticks out of the Compact Flash slot. This would bring wireless solutions to devices that could really benefit them. e.g. Cameras - you take a pic, it stores it locally, and then sends it over the wireless link to a box nearby to store it. PDA's - allows you to access network resouces when in range. And so on.

There are also H.323 compliant phones available that use IEEE 802.11 spread spectrum. They operate across your normal wireless network to provide wireless telephony. Now if only the cost would come down, I'd be happy! *sigh*

Re:Does IEEE 802.11 mean they all play well togeth

[Bryan Andersen]

I've just done a quick search on the web, but was not able to come up with an answer to my question: When two different manufacturers label their products as 802.11 complient, does this mean that I can use them together (as long as the frequency is the same, e.g. 2.4GHz)?

For the most part yes. There were a couple of open issues relating to the upper software layers (durring Spring 1999), but as for the hardware level they should be fully compatible. I haven't read the final spec to see if all the open issues were resolved or left open. And here is another one: When I buy a card in the US, will I be able to connect to lets say the European version?

I'm not positive on the answer to this, but I expect that the subset of frequencies to be different. I know it is between the US and Japan. Otherwise I think the hardware is the same. Now note that there is a couple of European groups working on other wireless lan standards.

When I go and setup my network at home I'm going to get cards that use the same chips in them. This is to squash all the possible compatibility issues as much as possible.

Semi OT: How far can these things go?

[glitch_]

I was just wondering. Me and my friend live rather close, only a couple houses away. We been trying to find a way of transfering files faster then the net, and short of running rj45 thru his window, we can't seem to find a viable solution. I know that the indoor range on these is approx. 300 feet peer to peer, or 300 feet to the nearest access point. Indoor being one thing, but has anyone tried these outside? or is there some other not-yet-on-the-market technology that would suit me better?

Re:Semi OT: How far can these things go?

[mindstrm]

The range can be extended greatly if you use a directional antenna. (one on each end) I have done this, and it works like a charm.
THe ratings they give are for their little crap omnidirectional antennas, that have almost no gain.
A directional yagi will give you great directonal gain, and allow you to do what you want. If oyu aren't comfortable with it, explain it to a radio technician who can make the appropriate custom cables for you.


To make an example... one pair of cards, rated at 600 feet, with the appropriate antennaes turned into a 17Km link from a mountain top to a cabin. Not bad for a few hundred bucks in wireless lan cards, and some good radio antennaes.




Also.. running cat5 cable between buildings is not such a good idea, you run the risk of ground loops and burnt wiring. Better to use 10BaseFL (cheap plastic optical cable) if you want to do it this way.

Re:Semi OT: How far can these things go?

[David F.]

I've been checking into something like this as well. I need about a 1/2 mile link, but it's not line of sight. Is there any chance that directional antennas will do the trick anyway?

Re:Semi OT: How far can these things go?

[mindstrm]

That depends on what's in the way, and what frequency you are using.

if it's 900 Mhz and a few trees, you might be okay.
If it's 2.4 Ghz and some trees.. hard to say. might work great.. might not.

If it's 3 new york blocks of steel reinforced concrete buildings.. not a chance.

Wireless networking and ROBOTS

[Lord_Sloth]

This may be slightly OT, but a few weeks (months?) ago there was a story on a robot (CYE?), this has always been a topic of interest to me and most geeks (most toys are of interest to geeks, and a robot is a very fun toy) I have wanted to fool around with robots for years, but seeing CYE gave me an idea, why make a robot, why not get a mobile computer with a wireless network card a digital video camera ect, I'm sure that you can see the potential, about this point I started researching wireless networking, I couldn't find much info on the internet, and the people at the local computer shops didn't know much, (there are only 3 or 4 shops here in Coffs Harbour, Australia), eventually I got the name "bluetooth" from someone at the local electronics shop but I couldn't find anything else. the entire concept is this, have a robot (on a mobile PC) connected across a wireless LAN th a gateway server (running Debian) connected to the Internet (the robots name will be HEX, after the computer in Terry Pratchetts Discworld books) unfortunatly I don't have any info on wireless networking, could someone point me in the right direction (ISA or PCI, not PCMCIA) as a final idea, equip the robot with one of those toy gun things (I think it was the Nerf Wildfire)

Re:Wireless networking and ROBOTS

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what we do here. Granted, our web pages haven't been updated in some time and therefore don't contain a whole lot of robot stuff.

While much of our funding is fron DARPA, we have not investigated the prosects of attaching toy guns yet.

Re:Wireless networking and ROBOTS

[Anonymous Coward]

In a general answer to several questions. There are two subtypes of the 802.11 specification, Direct Spread Spectrum and Frequency Hopping. They are not compatible. Each has it's advantages and disadvantages. There are three frequencies available and each AP (access point) uses one. With DSS you use the sequentially to avoid overlap of the same frequency. Frequency hopping allows more freedom of movement between and placing APs, because it hops between the three frequencies landing on the least crowded. Speeds are lower with FH, (1.2-2MBPS). DSS allows speeds of up to 11MBPS, so far. Any Questions? Email: ccsrace222@aol.com et.al.

Geek Compound at Comdex '99

[Fazed]

I visited comdex fall 1999 and was really happy to discover the wireless lan that was available for public use at the Geek Compound. This saved me so many headaches. The first day I managed to use one of the /. machines, all laptops, all wireless. I was able to use the net and check my servers whilst in Vegas. There was very minimal waiting time to get a seat (were they all scared of the geeks ;) ) which is cool seeing as they were in the UK and the queues at the email farm and novell stations were huge. The other days I just jacked in my Dell Inspiron using the supplied UTP and chatted away the time between keynotes and sessions I wanted to attend. Great work lads.

I found my experience of wireless lan very much transparent, latency was low and transfer speed was great. For home network, multiple node internet access this must be the solution. After all who wants cat 5 all over thier home/appartment/cellar ;)

Thanks again Geeks...

Outdoor Wireless Solutions for ISPs, etc.

[fridgepimp]

neat stuff

http://www.wavelan.com/news/news.html?id=76

Compaq WL

[LordDartan]

Has anybody heard anything about the Compaq WL series??
http://www.compaq.com/products/wlan/index.html
is the website for it and from the looks of it, seems pretty cool! Anyone know if it is supported under linux though??

Re:Compaq WL

[Anonymous Coward]

The driver mentioned in this article will work with the Compaq WL series.

Data Privacy

[kabir]

SSH Inc. has a very solid IPSec implementation for
Linux which would seem to address the privacy issues of a wireless lan. The ssh implementation isn't free at this point, but I can't imagine it will be too long before this issue is addressed in a more open source way. Heck, the Kame IPSec project for BSD also seems quite solid, and it's completely open/free. Is there an equivilent for Linux yet?
--

Bluetooth is the future

[mplex]

Anyone who knows anything about this technology knows what Im talking about. First of all, the price. The prices are around $30 for the chipset but it is expected to drop to about $5-$10 once mass production ramps up. This means they will show up everywhere.

So whats so great about bluetooth? Well it was orginally designed to replace irda but it will now be doing so much more. Bluetooth devices have about a 30ft range. When ever one device comes in contact with another, they set up somewhat of a mini network. Eight devices in all can make up one of these networks. One is the master telling the others what frequencies to skip to ect (Bluetooth operates at 2.4ghz and utalizes spread spectrum much like digital phones). These networks can then communicate with other networks of devices. This is all done on the fly and may be reconfigured constantly when new devices move in and out of the area.

So what can be done with this. Well, first the obvious, like networking printers ect but it has so much more potential. From what I hear, the bandwidth is comaprable to dsl which is plenty for most applications and other bluetooth devices dont hog the bandwidth. Well, for one you could could dial up a connection using your phone in your pocket without even touching it. Now imagine bluetooth everywhere and commercial services. Imagine negotiating for an internet connection in an airport without ahving to talk to anyone. Imagine pulic printers, and a slew of other things.

We are only beginning to realize what wireless technology can do. The potential is gigantic. There are some things to worry about like will each device have an id; autonegotiation is scary. 2.4ghz is also the resonate frequency of a water molecule, think leaky microwave. Still, I believe this is going to be amazing, 1) because its so cheap and 2) because its so easy. Truely plug and play networking. Expect to see bluetooth devices this spring and integration into laptops and phones by next fall. For more information, check out Bluetooths home page. Lots and lots of big name backers. This is no vaporware.

Re:Bluetooth is the future

[TurkishGeek]

Bluetooth bandwidth is about 741 Kb/s; not very close to high-end DSL; but very adequate. I agree Bluetooth is the future; and will be something that we can't live without; when it finally reaches the market. It will be big especially in Palm form-factor PDAs and cell phones.

2.4GHz is the ISM (industrial-scientific-medical) frequency band that doesn't require licencing by the FCC; and is allocated for similar use in most countries, except perhaps in France; where the military seems to be obsessed with using the most obscure frequencies possible.
--

BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Re:Bluetooth is the future

[mathie]

Hi,

This is not an announcement or anything (it's barely been started), but my final year project involves implementing Bluetooth for the Linux kernel. I'm hoping to have something useable by June. And of course, it will be released back under the GPL.

Now just to figure out how these fancy sk_buff thingies work. ;)

RadioLAN 10M, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Radiolan's 10M wireless cards for a while now, under Windows & they just plain rock. They're expensive, but hey, it's fast. Only problem is Linux support...anyone, anyone?

Shameless plug

[.@.]

Since this is being discussed, I'd like to mention that I've had great success using a Lucent WaveLAN silver at LISA '99, and subsequently bought a Lucent WaveLAN Gold and Apple AirPort Base Station for use with my subnotebook at home.

I wrote an Enlightenment Epplet to graphically monitor the signal strength to the card, something that comes in very handy if you're wandering from room to room or building to building.

It's called E-Wireless, and is available from FreshMeat here.

I haven't yet adapted it to WindowMaker, Afterstep, and such, but it shouldn't be difficult at all.

I'm also currently working on an app that will allow you to set up an Apple AirPort Base Station from Linux.

Re:Does IEEE 802.11 mean they all play well togeth

[Anonymous Coward]

here's the URL of the Apple AirPort doco that compares DSSS channel availability in different parts of the world

http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n585 50

brian whitaker
applications engineer, maxim
bwhitake@knarf.com

Security?

[Cycon]

The only issue (besides cost of course) keeping me from currently switching over to wireless networking at my place is security concerns.

Can anyone tell me about the potential security issues that arise once one is literally broadcasting their information? Is (for example) SSH just as secure over the airwaves as through an ethernet medium?

I have a 100baseTX connection to all of my boxes throughout my apartment, and that more than sufficiently serves my purposes, but it'd be nice to take my laptop outside to relax from time to time...

--Cycon

Re:Security?

[.@.]

The Lucent WaveLAN Silver card can do 64-bit encryption, and the WaveLAN Gold can do 128-bit.

Re:Security?

[Nate Eldredge]

Can anyone tell me about the potential security issues that arise once one is literally broadcasting their information? Is (for example) SSH just as secure over the airwaves as through an ethernet medium?

Why not? After all, the entire purpose of SSH is to provide secure communications over an insecure channel. You assume the bad guy is listening on the network, and make it secure anyway. With wireless, it's just a bit easier for that to actually be the case.

For normal unencrypted transmissions, though, it may be an issue as physical security is no longer sufficient to protect the network (you can't just lock the door). So then you may be vulnerable to eavesdroppers, spoofing, etc. If you're paranoid, you could tunnel everything else over ssh, which will avoid all that.

Re:Security?

[Webmonger]

SSH was designed using the assumption that the network is untrustworthy. It should be fine.

Re:Security?

[Freeptop]

Wireless networking done by Proxim's RangeLAN2, Symbols Spectrum24, Lucent's WaveLAN, and Aironet's 802.11 radios all communicate over the radio waves at the MAC layer of networking (I pick these radios specifically, because these are the ones I currently work with). Thus, if you are using SSH, that should be more or less as secure as if you aren't, since either way, the data is encrypted.
The real question should be about how secure wireless connections are when you are running, say, standard telnet, or web browsing without SSL, and such. In those cases, there is the possibility that someone can associate to your network from outside the building with a wireless card, and sniff your packets.
There is something you can do about this. The IEEE 802.11 wireless standard also provides for WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption. The idea is that wired communication should be at least as safe as wired communication. This encrypts data when it is sent over a radio, and decrypts it on the receiving radio.
Out of the radios I've worked with, I know for certain that Lucent's WaveLAN implements WEP with both 64 and 128 bits keys (depending on which version of the card you buy). Aironet is supposed to support WEP as well, but last I knew, they hadn't yet (this may have changed).
Proxim's RangeLAN2 doesn't follow the 802.11 standard, however they do have their own security built-in with a radio security ID, though I do not recall how strong this security is.

Re:Security?

[mindstrm]

Hmm.
Depends on the methods used.
DSSS is very difficult to sniff without a matching reciever that knows the appropriate codes.
FHSS is very difficult to sort out, especially if there are multiple transmitters (otherwise, you could sort out hops temporally). Of course.. signal strength is an indicator...

As for your neighbor using a compatable card to join your lan.. that's the only issue. Though there are a variety of methods employed to prevent sniffing in this manner, most are trivial in the end, and someone with a working knowledge of the driver & hardware in usecould modify it to show them everything. Of course, this also depends on the underlying protocol. Some types of Wlan actually negotiate individual packets securely.

Is SSH just as secure? The whole premise is that SSH is secure no matter who is listening. It's other protocols that will be insecure, as anyone within range can sniff.

Re:Security?

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea behind SSH is to provide a secure connection over a (potentially) insecure link. So in theory, SSH should be just as secure over a wireless link as over a wired one.

Bluetooth as a low-end wireless LAN..

[TurkishGeek]

Bluetooth products are about to show up pretty soon, and I agree it will be a hugely successful technology for things like you listed. Since the eventual target price for Bluetooth is $5/node; if they manage to meet that price target in two or three years, we might have $10 Bluetooth LAN cards that work for very short range (~50ft) at a rate acceptable for basic tasks (741 Kb/s).

Do you think Bluetooth might be successful in this role? It is definitely not something Bluetooth is designed for; but it will be so inexpensive that inevitably this will be an application.
--

BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Re:Bluetooth as a low-end wireless LAN..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd consider networking via bluetooth to be about the same level as networking via serial cable.... you can do it, might even want to in certain circumstances (esp. static situations - PC to printer in the same room, for instance), but I don't think it's going to displace the slightly higher powered wireless ethernet standards.

So sure, it'll be successful for things like adhoc PDA networking to your PC. But I wouldn't want to run a high-traffic LAN over it.

--Xandir

Re:it is not as bad as you think

[Anonymous Coward]

It is as bad as you think.. and quit posting that piece of shit link all over the place.

We're obviously leading to a wireless Internet.

[vido]

With the development / growth of the wireless LAN cards, it's inevitable that larger and larger networks are based on wireless transmissions.

Today's HAM network is only a lang-distance beginning.

Tomorrow's Internet may well be based on a tight network of millions of computers interconnected anf propagating each other's paquets by way of their network cards.

That will be the end of concentrated networks, and the birth of a really free Internet.

--

User caught thinking - Will be terminated with extreme prejudice.

How to Add Wireless to Existing Lan?

[VAXman]

I have a LAN at home, but most of my computers are not PC's, and do not have ISA/PCI/PCMCIA slots. So, converting my entire LAN to wireless is not an option.

However, I would like to add a wireless interface to my (Win98) laptop. What is the best way to do this? I saw a "wireless -> ethernet bridge" at Fry's, and it was $400. The Aviator set is something like $150. With this, would I be able to put two NIC's (one ethernet, and one wireless) into one PC, and set up the machine as a router? Or does anybody know of a cheaper bridge?

Re:How to Add Wireless to Existing Lan?

[TurkishGeek]

I have sold a similar problem (a bunch of Suns on a different floor) by buying an old 486 from a nearby college surplus store for something like $15; and I installed Linux along with an ISA Ethernet and the Aviator on it.

In my case, a 486 SX-25 with 8MB of RAM works flawlessly as an Ethernet-to-wireless bridge. I recommend you get a cheap, old 486 powerful enough to run Linux, do a minimal Linux installation, and either set up kernel bridging or use masquerading to connect your Win98 box to your VAXen or what you have at your home. I have mine on a small UPS; and it just runs away from sight in the depths of a cabinet. The whole thing should cost about $30 with the exception of the Aviator card.
--

BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Correcting knowledge gaps

[JennyWL]

the bandwidth is comaprable to dsl

Excuse me? Bluetooth's raw data rate is one, that's (1), Mbps. 1/100th the rate of fast Ethernet, and when you strip off the packet headers it's even less. This is comparable to DSL the way that a rowboat is comparable to the Queen Elizabeth II.

There are some things to worry about like will each device have an id; autonegotiation is scary

Of course each will have an ID: its MAC address, just like every network adapter on the planet. What's so scary about the autonegotiation? USB and 1394 handle it fine.

Jenny, incipient wireless engineer

Re:Does IEEE 802.11 mean they all play well togeth

[specht]

... now this is interesting: There is Europe and there is France. Something I suspected all along :-)

Aviator WebGear 2.4 is an awesome card

[Anonymous Coward]

Great price, good range (1000ft max, 300ft typ), works on Win9x/NT/Linux. Included PCMCIA adapters for desktops. What more could you ask for? :)

I also have the Diamond Homefree Wireless cards. They're awful in comparison. No range at all, and Win9x only. No NT, no Linux.

Darron

Why Wireless?

[FPhlyer]

I have been using portable computers for many years now. Wireless networking is only one half of fixing the portable problem. The number one problem is POWER CONSUMPTION. Sure, it's great to be able to wander about with your portable and still access the network, but you are still constrained by having to run back to your power supply and juice up those batteries.

Hopefully, now that Crusoe is here, the power problem has it's answer. That will be the biggest boost for wireless networking.

Re:Why Wireless?

[Tom7]

My wavelan card really doesn't suck much battery out of my poor little vaio. I thought it would, but it doesn't.

Why wireless? Until you've walked from class to the University Center while downloading a file, then ate lunch outside on the lawn while reading slashdot, you haven't experienced portable computing!

Re:Why Wireless?

[HeghmoH]

I get about 3.5-4 hours on a charge doing heavy web browsing with the backlight turned up all the way on my iBook. If I don't do any web browsing (so the hard drive can spin down) that bumps up to 4-5 hours, and turning the backlight down can make it go up even more. Aside from when I purposefully ran down the battery for testing, I have hit this limit exactly once.

I haven't noticed any real changes in battery life with my wireless card turned on versus being turned off, so I don't think it's an issue.

Re:Why Wireless?

[FPhlyer]

My point is not how much power the network card uses. Three to four hours of battery life won't work for me. Heck, my laptops only three months old and I'm lucky for the battery to hold out for two hours.

For wireless networking to work for ME, I need a portable that can keep going for at least ten hours. That's long enough for me to leave the house, spend the day at work, and get home to recharge.

I wish...

[Graymalkin]

I could afford wireless networking cards for all my boxes. *looks under his desk at all the cat-5 waiting to get tangled in the wheels of his chair* Oh boy don't I. I've wired half my house with cat-5. Wireless networking would be really cool especially since I could hang out on the back padio on my laptop reading /. but it is way too expensive for me. Enough cat-5 to wire my house and 4 NICs == 50$. One wireless networking card == 50$. It would be kinda nice having an AirPort hooked to my cable with all my other comps hooked wirelessly to it. So-called broadband available to the you and mes of America wouldn't max out 802.11a's bandwidth so it would be great for my house.

My reply

[mplex]

Excuse me? Bluetooth's raw data rate is one, that's (1), Mbps. 1/100th the rate of fast Ethernet, and when you strip off the packet headers it's even less. This is comparable to DSL the way that a rowboat is comparable to the Queen Elizabeth II.

I am not a blueooth expert and did not know the exact bandwidth, only that I have heard that it is comparable. If bluetooth is 1mbps and adsl goes up to 1.5mbps, I dont believe that is that big of a gap. Of course its the raw data rate, that is what all bandwidth is measured in. Perhaps you are confusing bits and bytes.

Of course each will have an ID: its MAC address, just like every network adapter on the planet. What's so scary about the autonegotiation? USB and 1394 handle it fine.

I was thinking along the lines if these devices show up everywhere and each is unique then you can be tracked. Give it some more thought, I think you will know exactly what I mean. And they thought cookies were bad. I hope that made some things clearer.

We need bridges

[drix]

The real killerapp for wireless tech will be a bridge, of all things - just a plain old transciever that plugs into any hub, switch, whatever. To date I have found only one such device from Proxim, and it costs over a thousand dollars. Think about it - no interplatform compatiblity issues, true interoperation with existing infrastructure, and no taking up slots in your server for radio equipment that could and should reside outside of it. I can't believe Diamond et al. didn't think of this when they made their home networking push. Carrying a signal over the phone lines is great and really, really convenient - but I am not going to downgrade from 10mbps Ethernet on 6 of my computers to 1.2mbps phone lines on 7 when I add another PC. If I could buy a HomeFree kit and a bridge from phone line -> ethernet into my existing hub, I'd have bought 10 of them months ago. Instead, I'm forced to sacrifice weekends stringing cable to whatever room gets the next PC (7 and counting ;). The same goes for any of the electric line packages, etc. Give us the bridges!

--

Re:We need bridges

[alhaz]

Lucent makes these for their WaveLan products, they've been around a real long time. Basically a little unit that accepts a wavelan pcmcia card.

Apple makes a lucent-compatible bridge for their AirPort line, or whatever it's called, that's supposed to just cost a couple hundred.

Re:We need bridges

[HeghmoH]

Apple's AirPort Base Station can function as a transparent bridge joining the wireless network with whatever's plugged into its ethernet port. In this mode, the computers on the wireless network act as if that ethernet cable was plugged straight into them.

The base station can also function as an NAT router through either the ethernet port or its built-in modem. It retails for around $300.

The downside is, of course, that you can only administer it from a Mac. So if you're PC-only, it's not much of an option, but if you have a Mac that you can use to configure it, it works wonderfully and is very cheap, and (supposedly, I haven't tried) interoperates with other WaveLAN-compatible products.

Re:We need bridges

[Pii]

...and (supposedly, I haven't tried) interoperates with other WaveLAN-compatible products.

Well, I have tried, it it works flawlessly (At least for the Lucent/Apple products). 802.11b compatible products (provided you mind the DSSS/FHSS issue) will all work together, just as Ethernet cards from different vendors work today. I've taken my laptop w/WaveLAN card to a friend's place, and operated through his AirPort.

I've also had him come over to my place with his iBook, and he has no problem connecting to my Linux "Base Station."

WaveLAN (as has been mentioned, Apple's product is the OEM version of WaveLAN Silver) is a fantastic product, and has been for quite a while.

It should also be noted that while Lucent hasn't completely opened up their drivers, they have actually gone to the trouble of releasing the Linux drivers themselves. I suspect that the reason the drivers aren't completely open has to do with the encryption stuff, as the same driver runs the Bronze (No encryption), Silver (40-bit WEP), and Gold (128-bit Proprietary) versions of their product.

You will pay a little extra for Lucent, no doubt about it, but they can be had online at astonishingly low prices compared to what WaveLAN used to cost. (I got started with the WaveLAN 900Mhz stuff... No MAC layer... Interstation tranmitting has to go through the WavePoint Bridge... No Ad Hoc... 1.5Mb/s on the best day...) A single adapter back then used to cost ~$450.00. The AccessPoint was in the Thousands (around $1800-$2400 if I'm not mistaken). I bought 3 Bronze cards a few weeks ago for $138.00 each. The Silver version is about $175.00.

These are the Turbo version, 802.11b HR (upto 11Mb/s).

You can order them at Brumley and Associates. This is the only online dealer listed at Lucent's WaveLAN site.

Wireless over Voice???

[Anonymous Coward]

okay, since these Lucent cards can do 11Mbps...

has anyone ever tried putting VoIP/or some sort of voice application over these things to see how well they work??? i've played Quake 2 over wireless and its seemless!!!

Wireless networking isn't exactly OS dependent

[JennyWL]

Why does it matter? Wireless networking xmitters should understand ethernet packets. They should not care what OS is producing them.

And in fact they don't. At least not as far as transmission goes. But once you've caught a packet and stripped off the header, what do you do with the contents? Send 'em out serially? Parallel? How are you marking start and stop? That's where OS (and hardware) dependence comes into the picture. And like it or not, one particular OS has most of the market among the businesses who can afford to buy new technology, so that's the OS that people build for.

Because of the OS independence of ethernet, I believe it would have been a better choice than USB as a peripheral bus.

How do you figure? You want as little management overhead on the data part of your peripheral bus as possible: that's why PCI has so many special signals (REQ#, GNT#, FRAME#, etc.) that are just for control of who's got the bus. This leaves the address/data lines free for shoving data as fast as your clock can mark it off. This is an example of the basic rule that hardware can accomplish a given task faster than software but at greater cost: the PCI bus is some 47 signals wide. But pulling 47-strand wire would be a real pain, so Ethernet makes do with 8 and accomplishes all the overhead by encoding it in the packet header, which could be considered software for the purpose of the rule above.

If packaged ethernet PCI cards can sell new for $8, then the ethernet chipset can't be all that expensive to stat building into printers, scanners, etc.

Perhaps you've never heard of a print server? Or network attached storage? These are examples of peripherals that are on the network. The time delay communicating with them is acceptable because people can deal with printing or file accesses taking a while to complete. But would you want your mouse or keyboard to have the same kind of latency? I think not: you'd be shot down each time you respawned while you waited for your mouse movement to process.

But ethernet is not Intel's baby like USB is, so it'll be build onto mboards to the detriment of all that is better. Firewire never had a chance except maybe in the Mac world.

Since when is USB Intel's baby? Last I heard it was its own standard, as in standards organization... USB is not a competitor against Ethernet, it's a competitor against the serial port (and a vastly superior competitor at that). And Firewire is a competitor against, well, something like AGP and something like the home entertainment network that doesn't presently exist. It achieves its greater throughput by eliminating some of the error checking of USB, so you wouldn't want it for file access, where every bit is critical. But it's great for streaming music or video because a bit here or there on those is no great loss. Ethernet doesn't compete against either one--it's for communication among independent systems, where a peripheral bus is for communication among subparts of one system.

Jenny

Re:Wireless networking isn't exactly OS dependent

[fornix]

the PCI bus is some 47 signals wide. But pulling 47-strand wire would be a real pain, so Ethernet makes do with 8

I thought Ethernet made do with 2. No?

It will be interesting to see if JINI catches on for these kinds of things.

Re:Wireless networking isn't exactly OS dependent

[nichts]

4

Re:Wireless networking isn't exactly OS dependent

[pivo]

Depends, coax ethernet only uses one!

Re:Wireless networking isn't exactly OS dependent

[alhaz]

USB is Intel's baby since Intel came up with it in the first place, deployed it in their chipsets first, etc.

Firewire is pretty fast. but it's nowhere near as fast as AGP, nor is it vaguely similar in any way i can think of.

For starters, AGP 4x is a few orders of magnitude wider than firewire, with **MUCH** shorter wire lengths . . .

Re:Wireless networking isn't exactly OS dependent

[JennyWL]

I liken Firewire to AGP only in that they both are suitable to high-volume transmissions where some errors are tolerable. Of course you wouldn't make a video board with a Firewire interface to use inside your system. That would be as silly as using Ethernet in place of PCI, which was the idea I jumped all over at first. But there are Firewire video editors, it's showing up in digital cameras, and there's at least a few VCRs out there with it. Probably DVD as well, I just haven't looked recently. The most compelling scenario I've seen for actually using Firewire was in a Popular Mechanics article a few years back that described a home network with the PC as one node but not the controller, and which linked in the VCR, the TV, the cameras at the doors (OK, not a standard home), and the rest of the security system. But that required stringing more cable, and that one fact will probably ensure that wireless grows faster as soon as it hits the magic $200 price point for a complete home setup.

Jenny

Too rich for my blood still

[pheonix]

It's still too expensive for me though. It was far cheaper to cleanly cat-5 cable each room in my house (except the bathroom, that just seemed wrong) with wall jack terminations and to buy a few *LONG* jumpers in the even I want to surf from the back or front deck. I'm pulling 10meg/s and having none of the problems with interference that I experienced with earlier generation wireless.

I'm glad that they seem to have gotten past all of those earlier issues though. When testing some wireless solutions, things like being in the kitchen when the microwave was on or even too much ambient noise in the room would interrupt my connection.

If they can just make the price a bit more comparable to wiring your house and buying standard NICs, it'll become the solution for me.

Re:Too rich for my blood still

[.@.]

WaveLAN Gold cards can be found for $200 from
www.wirelessguys.com. The AirPort Base Station
(which is OEM'd from Lucent) can be had from Apple
for $300, and has a built-in 10^T connection and 56Kbps modem, along with DHCP and bridging software.

Wireless support under linux

[Freeptop]

Proxim:
One of the engineers at Proxim maintains a mailing list for running RangeLAN2 and symphony radios under linux. It gets a fair amount of traffic, and updates are posted fairly often.
You can download the driver at:
Lucent:
http://www.komacke.com/distribution.html

There is a stripped down version of Lucent's WaveLAN driver code which is used by the WaveLAN driver for Linux. You can find this one at:
http://www.wavelan.com/support/s oftware/index.html

There is also a Linux driver for the Aironet radios which can be found at: ftp://sourceforge.org/pcmcia/contrib/

My personal opinion is that the Aironet driver is kind of nice, since it is small and efficient (neither the Lucent nor the Proxim drivers are), and since Aironet has an 11Mb radio, is compatible at least with Lucent's Access Points (and should be with other 802.11 radios), Aironet is nice if you want speed under linux. Unfortunately, I am not sure whether Aironet supports WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) or not yet, and I know the Linux driver doesn't yet, so if you are interested in Security, I would recommend the Lucent Radio.


Obligatory Note: This is my personal opinion, and should not be construed as the opinion of any other entity.

Re:Wireless support under linux

[Freeptop]

Additional note, I forgot to mention Access Point configurability...
The biggest drawback to Lucent's Access Point is that at the current time, it can only be configured via their (Windows) WaveMANAGER program. Both Proxim's and Aironet's Access Points can be configured via telnet or a web interface, and thus are configurable via Linux.

Interoperability

[Ravenscall]

So, just how compatible are these devices going to be with devices like the Apple AirPort??? Yes, the use the same IEEE standard, but say I have my nice little Mac AirPort network running and I have this great little Linux PC that I would like to integrate into it. Would I need yet another transponder base for the PC's, or am I going to be able to get this hot little wireless card and run it off of my Air Port base station?

Also, does anybody know if the LinuxPPC guys or the YellowDog Linux people have drivers for the Apple AirPort cards yet? Considering the fact that Linux has Appletalk built into the Kernel, if these cards are indeed compatible with the AirPort, They would be a natural selection for cross-platform networking. Not to mention a great excuse to work on Darwin OS or the Mac Linux flavors for added geekpoints (TM).

Re:Interoperability

[.@.]

The AirPort Base Station is 802.11 compliant, meaning it can work with any 802.11-compliant card.

Until Apple releases version 1.1 of the AirPort software, however, the encryption will not work.

Re:Interoperability

[the eric conspiracy]

Until Apple releases version 1.1 of the AirPort software, however, the encryption will not work.

Apple has already released version 1.1 of their AirPost software.

Re:Interoperability

[.@.]

"Apple has already released version 1.1 of their AirPost software."

Where? It's not showing up on the TechInfo Library. A URL would be most appreciated.

Re:Interoperability

[HeghmoH]

http://asu.info.apple.com/swu pdates.nsf/artnum/n11570

It was released about twelve hours ago, so don't feel too bad about not being up to speed.

Btw, it works great! It's a wonderful improvement to an already wonderful product.

Wireless tracking risk?

[JennyWL]

Forgot how not-blazingly-fast DSL is compared with wired networking: I was thinking of DSL vs dialup. My bad. On to your other point.

if these devices show up everywhere and each is unique then you can be tracked.

Consider another wireless technology in which each access device has a unique identifier and autonegotiates its connection with the base station: cell phones. They can now be tracked (and if I had to call 911 from mine I'd be very grateful for the fact). But remember the furor that arose before that decision was agreed to. Are you referring to the idea that your transactions from your wireless address might be stored and associated with that address? If so, that risk exists now for MAC addresses (as Nick Petreley pointed out months ago in one of his InfoWorld columns--see here). So has the threat materialized? I haven't seen it myself--I've seen the privacy community doing a great job of shining a bright spotlight on anyone trying to do anything like this. I think the threat may not be bigger than cookies.

Jenny

Re:it is not as bad as you think

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? Why isn't this moderated down? He posts every time with a link to this CNN mirror

OK, you foil sniffers...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but can someone associate to your network and attack, for example, service port on a server? In other words, can they attach anonymously like SSL?

I mean, let's say, for example, that you put a wireless LAN up and you were running a server OS that allowed anonymous users to attach to it and download security files (let's call that the "SAM" for argument's sake). Even without the ability to sniff, this still opens up a nasty vulnerability.

Re:OK, you foil sniffers...

[Freeptop]

I am not sure if other companies implement this, but I do know that the WaveLAN Access point can be configured to deby unencrypted data. In this case, even if they try to associate, it will do them no good, since the Access Point will drop the packets they send.

Re:OK, you foil sniffers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the info.

Another poster pointed out that the WEP protocol uses a shared secret so I imagine that you can't join a WEPed network without possessing that secret. It sounds as if the WaveLAN allows three levels: no WEP, voluntary WEP or mandatory WEP.

Forgetting one point

[mplex]

Consider another wireless technology in which each access device has a unique identifier and autonegotiates its connection with the base station: cell phones. They can now be tracked

You are forgetting one point. Only the cell phone company can track you. Your cell phone only talks to your network. With bluetooth, it will negotiate with any other device. Anyone that wants to can track these devices. I think it presents a large problem but maybe I am just too cautious.

Re:Forgetting one point

[JennyWL]

Your cell phone only talks to your network. With bluetooth, it will negotiate with any other device. Anyone that wants to can track these devices.

You mean 'any other device within range', which is only about 10 meters. Bluetooth transmits at 1 milliwatt, as compared to about 1.5 watts for a cell phone. You don't get a lot of range at that power, meaning that networks of Bluetooth devices will exist wherever a bunch of them are collected (in a building, basically) but one building-wide network won't be connected to another building. The only way one building worth of Bluetooth devices would be trackable outside that building would be if it was connected to the Internet or if someone is listening with an EXTREMELY sensitive receiver. Internet tracking is something we already know how to fight. As for the sensitive receiver, well, if that kind of capability is deployed nationwide they've been getting an awful lot of cordless phone traffic for a long time now. We can hope that, at 100 mW, the HomeRF transmissions will drown out the Bluetooth ones (they'll both be hopping in the same band).

HOWTO?? - Corporate Internet + Mobile Connectivity

[jr_klein]

Looking for advice regaurding logical network location of wireless access points.

We are planning to pick up some internet connectivity via wireless APs (802.11) from a few blocks away next month. These APs will be OUTSIDE of our firewall.

We are also planning to provide mobile users with wireless connectivity (802.11 as well). Our reseller suggested that we place a SEPARATE access point INSIDE our private network.

My concerns regaurding this suggestion are three-fold:
1. What forces mobile users' wireless cards to use a specific access point??
2. Would it be more logical to use a single access point located OUTSIDE of our firewall and force mobile users to VPN into the network, assuming that bandwidth would not be an issue? (in order to help prevent others from accessing our corporate network)
3. How could we prevent others from using our internet bandwidth? Possibly create a VPN over the wireless link? Any other possibilities??

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks,

J Klein
jr_klein@_N0_SPAM_4_ME_yahoo.com

I in IEEE

[mike_g]

And since the I in IEEE (the standards body that specified 802.11) stands for 'International', I sure hope you can connect with European versions :)

Sorry to tell you, but the I stands for Institute. As in Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

European versions would be regulated by the respective countries FCC equivalent. So as long as the frequencies are available, they should work together fine. Just like standard ethernet. There are not different european and american versions of the ethernet standard.

Re:I in IEEE

[Sunpig]

European versions would be regulated by the respective countries FCC equivalent. So as long as the frequencies are available, they should work together fine.

Does anyone know if any European bodies have granted their approval for these cards to use the relevant part of the spectrum?

Re:price - compare to convenience

[mcleodnine]

It's the convenience for notebook types. However it's more than just a wireless card - it would be nice to get a wireless hub/repeater. There isn't a lot of growth potential in a 'home run' from my notebook to a wireless NIC in the server (you'll run outta PCI slots), and you'd have to down the server to add NIC's as you add wireless users (boink!).

All that really matters to the end user is the wireless notebook/workstation; so I'd be happy to get the wireless 'base station' on the same copper playing field everyone else is on.

Re:Wireless WebPad - Killer App for Transmeta WebP

[Smack]

And add in a wireless modem while you're at it. Then it works fast in a known environment like your home, but works passably everywhere. Would be sweet. If they could get it under a grand, I'd buy it.

Apple AirPort etc.

[Gandalf_007]

A guy from Apple spoke to the computing society here and demonstrated the AirPort technology, and I must say, it really rocks! Surfing the web was the same as on any machine connected to the lan, and it was flawlessly streaming 30 fps (~0.5-1 MB -- that's megabytes, mind you) Quicktime videos. And this was on an iBook about 50 ft. away from the hub! (Supposed to work up to 100 ft.) He also said it's fully IEEE 802.11 compliant, so it'll work with those pcmcia cards for x86 laptops as well. Now if I just had the money to buy one!

WaveLAN

[DiSKiLLeR]

I've been using the IEEE 802.11 2mbit WaveLAN cards for some time now on FreeBSD and Win9x.

They work absolutely great. I got a WaveLAN in a ISA->PCMCIA adapter in my FreeBSD router, and the other WaveLAN in my laptop which gives me the freedom to roam around the house, or go outside, and still be on the 'net.

I'm surprised Linux is only just now getting proper wireless support ? Has it had IEEE 802.11 WaveLAN support at all? I did install Slackware7 on my laptop for a few days, and pccardd does identify my card. But it never worked ?

I'm preparing to setup a wireless link over 2 to 3km's (2 miles) to my uncles place, who has a real big LAN setup at home :) (look up 'diskiller' on Ebay and look at the stuff we've been buying ;). Actually, if you do the research, the appropriate antenna don't cost much at all to cover distances ~2km. Once you get to 6km+ distances the cost goes through the roof.

So fellow geeks. Network up, and enjoy permanent links to your fellow geeks 'round the city :)

BTW, i'm from Austalia, its much cheaper here to use WaveLAN's to setup links between branches, offices, etc, then hire out DSL, Frame Relay, and other such lines from telco's.

Re:Firewire's market + USB 802.11 adaptors?

[Splork]

And Firewire is a competitor against, well, something like AGP and something like the home entertainment network that doesn't presently exist. It achieves its greater throughput by eliminating some of the error checking of USB, so you wouldn't want it for file access, where every bit is critical. But it's great for streaming music or video because a bit here or there on those is no great loss. Ethernet doesn't compete against either one--it's for communication among independent systems, where a peripheral bus is for communication among subparts of one system.

I disagree. USB was initially not supposed to take on Fireware in competition. However with the usb 2.0 spec (~480mbit/sec max) it looks like that is exactly what they're going to push for.

The lack of bus protocol-level error correction in one particular instance of firewire bus transfers (isochronous transfers) is not where its speed comes from. It was simply designed from the beginning to support a higher signalling rate rather than be ultra-cheap to implement (usb's original goal).

To add something on topic: has anyone seen an IEEE 802.11 USB doohickey? Is USB's max of 5V 500mA power to a device sufficient?

Greg

802.11 "Compatibility"?

[alhaz]

Yeah, I'm one of those guys who thinks it'd be Really Cool to have one less cable coming out of the side of his notebook. And I'd like to be able to take the notebook out in the yard, etc.

The Aviator cards sound like a fantastic deal, there's just one thing i wonder about.

How interoperable is this kinda thing? I ask, because my employer has a Lucent WaveLan Bronze bridge set up at work, and it would be Really Slick if i could carry my notebook to work, change the SSID, and hook up there as well.

I like the Lucent gear, sure, but sheesh it's expensive. I really like the price of the Webgear setup, but, are they doomed to be a closed loop? Will i have to buy another card to set up a bridge at work to use the same wireless setup there?

Maybe you mean "Voice over Wireless"?

[Tom7]

Maybe you mean "Voice over Wireless"?

Fun without wires

[Anonymous Coward]

Hemos and Roblimo make their living as syncronized swimming instructors. Hemos and Roblimo like animals. You could even say they love animals. In their spare time, Hemos and Roblimo express their immense love for animals in their own "special" way. In this first episode our two characters (mad with desire) have broken into a local hospital where they find their first victim.

Hemos and Roblimo made their way into the lab where the animal experiments were conducted. A cute, fuzzy rabbit had caught their eye...

The evil duo quickly subdued the little lab rabbit. They strapped the now helpless animal's head to the sex table with hot leather. Roblimo had they urge, and removed his pants, which were now buldging. After slipping off his briefs, Roblimo tightly fastened the leather straps and was ready to begin.......

Roblimo began to "grease up". Shoving endless amounts of vaseline and baby oil all around the rabbit's ass, he slid his purple head firmly into the rabbit's tight asshole. Even though the rabbit was slightly unconscious, screams of pain were constanly being emmited. Hemos reached for the chain whip and smacked the rabbit's soft nose until its face was soaked with blood. Now, with the rabbits head drooped over the edge of the table, Roblimo continued his sex hunt. His now tingling cock was pushed deeper and deeper through the thick layers of skin which covered the bowel tract. Five, six, seven, then finally all eight and 3/4 inches were plunged deep within the animal's love canal.

Roblimo's manhood tingled with every slight movement of the now half alive rabbit. He began rhythmically sliding in and out, moaning with pleasure on every thrust. Roblimo worked himself into a hot orgasm. The blood, now coming steadily out of the rabbit's ass with every thrust of Roblimo's pelvis, could be heard dripping on the floor. Roblimo's rate increased and with a final push, he spurted creamy white love gel far up into the rabbit's bleeding ass.

The blood and cum mixed together on the floor, which had now accumulated a large puddle. Unknown to Roblimo, the semen had acted as a powerful enemma for the rabbit and out ushered the contents of its intestine. The stool was loose and soft. It fell to the ground with a soft thud and broke into small pieces. The obnoxious smell caught Roblimo's attention, and no sooner had he fallen to the ground and began licking the large puddle of blood, sperm, and stool. Exited at Roblimo's enthusiasm, Hemos dropped to his knees and also began to slurp the foul mixture.

After cleaning the floor with their tongues, Roblimo and Hemos checked on the battered lab rabbit. It was barely able to hold its head up, as it had lost control of most of its motor fuctions. Feeling no pity for this sexually mistreated animal, they unstrapped it and tossed it across the room, only to make a loud and deep thud against the wall. Its blood soaked fur left spatters of red stains everywhere it touched. Hemos reached for his chain whip, while Roblimo grabbed a pair of rusty hedge clippers (one of the many torture devices carried around for "convenience"). They made their way over to the rabbit. The rabbit was struggling for every last bit of air it could, just gasping and wheezing.

"Awwwww. Poor little thing," Hemos maniacally laughed. He raised his arm and thrust the cold metal whip down, exposing the rabbit's bloody flesh. He kept whacking and whacking at the furry bag of blood. Then, when Hemos stopped to catch his breath, Roblimo stepped over with his rusty hedge clippers. He knelt over the rabbit who was knocking loudly on death's door. Roblimo took a quick glance at the clippers, grinned, and then thrust them deep into the body of the rabbit, obviously hitting many arteries. As the blood squirted into Roblimo's face he moved the clippers around in hopes to find a thick bone to crunch. "Aha! The femur!" he yelled out with excitement. Roblimo wedged the clippers against the bone. He opened them wide......then closed down on them with all his might. The bone could be heard deep inside the rabbit, being mutilated. Death had glazed the bunny's eyes.

The rabbit lay dead, a bloody mess on the floor. Its bodily fluids freely surged across the tiled floor. Then with a look of extreme satisfaction, both Roblimo and Hemos lit up some smokes, gathered their belongings and quietly left the hospital grounds, knowing with confidence that they would strike again, somewhere, soon.

Re:Does IEEE 802.11 mean they all play well togeth

[mindstrm]

As far as I can tell, 802.11, by itself, does not guarantee that they all play well together.
802.11 covers infrared, FHSS, DSSS, several bands.
Now. I'm ignorant, I haven't read the whole spec, and i"m positive a subsection of it does deal with exact physical (radio) modulation & the like... (like 802.11a, 802.11b, etc... who knows).

Just as 802.3 by itself does not indicate the media type (is it 10Base2? 10BaseT? 10Broad25? 100BaseFL?).. 802.11 by itself does not specify the radio band or modulation type.
All you can confer when someone says '802.3' or '802.11' is the frame format, and an overall understanding of how the network functions at layers 1&2.
Subsections will indicate how various connection methods work. In 802.3, subsections describe physical media of various types, essentially defining standards. 802.11 will be the same way, but it's the frequency and modulation that will be at issue? is it AM IR? FM IR? DSSS 900Mhz ISM? FHSS 2.4Ghz ISM? (subsonic accoustic?) Gravity waves??

Bunk?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Also.. all that junk about microwave ovens heating water molecules by using 'specific resonant frequencies' is bunk.

Total bunk? How so? 600W Really isn't all that much power, so you might as well target it at a frequency that it is most effective at. Water _is_ in most food, and microwaving doesn't affect ceramic, plastic or paper unless it is touching something through conduction that is very affected.

I really don't know the absorbtion spectra of water so I can't say much in that area and I can't find anything with Google, so I guess all I can say is maybe you are right. My college Chem professors (ones with PhDs and such) said that it was the case that microwaves were designed such that to resonate water. It makes good sense, as water is possibly the most common molecule in food, has a high thermal capacitance (takes a lot of energy to heat up) and you only need to target a single bond type, the O-H bond, all point to good reason to make this the case, even if it isn't so.

correct link

[markjrubin]

The correct link to the site is http://www.absoval.com. These people are among the nicest people I have ever met. They got me started in linux a few years ago and were just dying to help me. They also have great tastes in restaurants. I wish them the best of luck and hope they make lots of money.

Re:Does IEEE 802.11 mean they all play well togeth

[mindstrm]

Just as 802.3 does not specify the physical media, 802.11 does not specify frequency/modulation.
802.11 simply describes the protocol to be used of the wireless media, whatever it may be.
802.3 specifies the frame header, the preamble (used to synchronize the receiver), the checksum, the CSMA/CD mechanism, the backoff mechanism, etc...
802.11 does the same thing for wireless. The media is still variable.

symphony

[danipell]

We use symphony cards with unidirectional antennas from tiltek.com A little pricey but we can make a multi point cross village network. The linux software fits on a floppy and does port forwarding. cheap computer without a harddrive does quite well. Next on the list is to create small sealed boxes that can be mounted outside on the house or on the telephone pole with only the network cable coming into the house.

15km???????

[jaxn]

are you really serious? 15km?

Lucent Wireless (Australia)

[Kram_Llens]

We at the RMIT PC Test lab tested Wireless Netorking products (mainly under Windows) for the Ziff Davis PC Magazine Australia. I found the Lucent Wavelan to be the best of the products tested, and the only one to offer support for Linux. The PC Cards and Access Points were simple to configure and provided good results in the speed tests Mark

wireless + ssh + vpn + cable +adsl

[obi]

I'm currently looking into setting up a rather complex network. This is going to be implemented in a month or two-three.

Here's the situation:

We have a number of people/offices, that all have cable access or adsl access (6 cable 1 adsl) The cable provider blocks all incoming ports 1000, and forces proxy use on port 80. A dynamic IP is gotten through dhcp. The ADSL provider is pretty much thesame.

In at least 3 of these places, wireless networking is going to be used. Since we're in a mixed environment (Windows, Mac, Linux) we have no option but to use Lucent's cards. (do we?)

In each of these 7 places there's a lowly 486 box doing ip masquerading.

What I want to do:

- have the ability to surf the net in each of those places.
- be able to "see" the pc's on the lans of the distributed locations, as though they were on thesame lan. (VPN)
- use crypto to secure the VPN.
- use a transparent proxy setup to mask the forced use of a proxy for webtraffic.
- have the ability to use the laptops in each of the locations transparently. (3 locations with wireless)
- i'm hesitating to use dhcp on the lan/vpn: to avoid being stranded if a node goes down, all the routers must deal out ip's to their own lans. They have to watch it not to step on each other's toes in the vpn though.

My questions:
- you think all this masquerading, VPN forwarding, and encrypting is too much for lowly 486 boxes?
- what about latencies? Does crypto + wireless + vpn increase the latency alot?
- Apple's airport base station - how configurable is this from linux?
- what about the limitations of the providers: how will the routers be able to find each other if they all have dynamic ip's. What if a node/router gets disconnected - how will it be reintegrated on the vpn?

- and finally: how can you maintain a bunch of routers like that? I'm using Debian potato for the masq'ed routers now, and i already have to spend too much time looking/maintaining them. Anyone has some good ideas/insights on how to manage all of them?


I think it must be possible, but it's not really a run of the mill configuration. We have hosting where we put our email/databases and stuff, but we don't have access to a name server - best we can get is a CNAME in our domain.

Once this is up and running, it will be fun though.

Re:wireless + ssh + vpn + cable +adsl

[Keeper ofthe Keys]

In at least 3 of these places, wireless networking is going to be used. Since we're in a mixed environment (Windows, Mac, Linux) we have no option but to use Lucent's cards. (do we?)

No ... Breezecom also has drivers for those O/S's (they even have ones for the HP Journada)

- have the ability to surf the net in each of those places.

Just hook up a Breezecom AP-10 to each LAN, set it to "roaming" mode and you're done.

- be able to "see" the pc's on the lans of the distributed locations, as though they were on thesame lan. (VPN)
- use crypto to secure the VPN.
- use a transparent proxy setup to mask the forced use of a proxy for webtraffic.


GateWeaver has a good VPN solution ... sets up connections with 1024bit RSA, then switches to 128bit BlowFish to run. Does cross-subnet browsing for WinBlows clients (SMB/NetBeui)

- have the ability to use the laptops in each of the locations transparently. (3 locations with wireless)
- i'm hesitating to use dhcp on the lan/vpn: to avoid being stranded if a node goes down, all the routers must deal out ip's to their own lans. They have to watch it not to step on each other's toes in the vpn though.

Best suggestion : set each internal LAN to use its own subnet (ie 10.0.1.0, 10.0.2.0, 10.0.3.0, etc), VPN them together and have DHCP assign IP addresses to the laptops (this way they get the right router gateway address ... you don't want to tunnel crypto to another site and then go open wire because the wrong gateway is set).

Your 486 boxes will probably not have the horse power for VPN crypto ... I've seen 128bit run nicely on a P-166, but nothing lower than that yet.


Wireless Internet in Southern Ontario available NOW! WDSL Inc.

Airport without a Mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you use a mac to configure the Airport or just use the DHCP defaults?

I'm thinking about putting together a similar setup, but the Airport config bothers me a bit. The config software on the Mac talks through the ethernet network connection, so perhaps a port scan and a telnet client might be able to start the reversing process. Have you done a port scan on the airport?

Wireless Networking

[smokyo]

I received a set of the Diamond Wireless networking for christmas this year. Its only 1mbps which is adequate for sharing the dsl at the homestead.. well enough to do internet sharing and even some video streaming.

Let me tell you, the coolest thing ever was setting up the client box and beam-streaming some mp3 live over the air :)

However, until some of this newer tech, such as bluetooth or the currently vaporfull firewireless tech get on scene, this will remain more of a toy. I can't even buy another card for in another box at less than a hundred dollars, and this is at 1mbps.

I'm not sure whether there is linux support for these yet, or if there ever will be, this mini-network is based on two win32 boxes.


I guess I'll have the luxury of telling my grand-chillins I was one of the first to not use those funny wire things though

related links:

Diamond HomeFree Wireless

Official Bluetooth page

TheRegister Article on Firewireless

Re:price - compare to convenience

[Julz]

I thought that was the idea behind the Apple Airport Hub with 56k modem?

WaveLan cards and Linux

[Julz]

A friend of mine has setup a couple of WaveLan cards on two linux boxes separated by about 3km. They share a connection to the net via Satellite.

He says it is a pretty cheap solution for them because they also get to share resources between servers as well.

Re:price - compare to convenience

[Dahan]

There are wireless repeaters... just about all companies that sell 802.11 cards also sell "access points," which is basically a repeater and bridge to a wired Ethernet. And even if you don't have one of those, you don't need to add more NICs for each wireless user... you only need one wireless NIC in the server. Anyways, I just got a Webgear Aviator2.4 yesterday... pretty cool :) Using it with NetBSD, BTW...

BreezeCom has also a network WLAN cards for linux.

[rasjani]

Topic says it all. Linux drivers for pcmcia cards has been out a while now.
--

Wireless - Quake 2 etc etc

[frog51]

I use Symbol and Telxon/Aironet 802.11 radio systems every day because they definitely have the top performance on the market. My department has tested every name on the market and they came out on top. Access Points configurable through telnet.
Unfortunately they are only now porting drivers to Linux
I tend to use it a lot for Quake 2 sessions - one access point for 5 users within a couple of hundred feet and a wireless ethernet bridge across about 5 km to 2 users in another suburb.
No glitches! Runs sweet as sugar. The low overhead on an RF Lan means an 11Mbit link is generally 2 or 3 times faster than 10BaseT ethernet.
And the price...well, if we did without, we would have to pay for dialup - 7 x 10p per minute x hours and hours - and get a performance hit.

On another note, have you seen Symbol's new palm pilot with laser scanner and rf connectivity. It can run as a telnet, 5250, oracle or html client. Nice.

PCMCIA adapters - where to buy?

[derk]

I've got a bunch of WAVELAN cards (the old, not IEEE certified version) around the place.

In order to use them, I need at least one, and probably a few, PCMCIA adapters for my desktop(s). Anyone know a place where these can be had at a decent price? Last time I looked they were still ridiculously expensive.

Thanks!

Derk

Re:Does IEEE 802.11 mean they all play well togeth

[Keeper ofthe Keys]

802.11 doesn't specify FH (Frequency Hopping) or DS (Direct Sequencing). DS is what's taking over.

DS will not take over for the following reasons:

1. Although very fast, each DS cell uses a full 1/3 of the ISM bandwidth, and depending on interference this usually means a maximum of TWO co-located networks. While this may not mean much, right now, if you're in an office tower, and you have 2 neighbors running DS wireless lan's, you're out of luck. You need to be completely out of range to start a new cell (and not just the 11mb cell that everyone talks about, its only 150ft, i'm talking about the 1000-3000ft 1mb cell that is the faded signal propogation.

FH systems can have up to 26 co-located cells (or networks), although only about 10 is practical before speed drops off.

2. DS is very sensitive to interference. Fire up a DS wireless lan (lucent, wavelan, etc) and it'll work fine in a room. Now fire up a couple of FH lan devices, and you'll find that the DS link drops out pretty quick. (BTW - it's completely legal to do this, and there's nothing you can do if someone decides to jam your network).

3. DS doesn't do roaming very well. By this I mean inter-network, such as you would see with a wireless internet provider ... with FH, you can be doing 60mph in a car and keep your connection running 2mbit and depending on conditions/hardware 3mbit.

DS works really well in high-power situations like long distance links, but the power limitations of ISM severely restrict its useability. FH, although slightly slower can handle hundreds of users in the same area on multiple networks without choking.




Wireless internet in southern ontario available NOW! WDSL Inc.


DEFS: DS = Direct Sequence, FH = Frequency Hopping

Breezecom

[Keeper ofthe Keys]

1/2 mile ad-hoc link!

I needed to get a link up between our two buildings for about a month (waiting to move), bought an Access Point, Station Adapter and a PCMCIA card (for me!). Hung two low gain directional antennas out the window and away we went.

Full 2mbit connection with one antenna masking taped to a second floor window, across a mall (about 3 blocks) to the second antenna, screwed into a board hanging out of a third floor window over 1/2 mile away.

I did some load testing on it just to see what the throughput was using QCheck. 1.3 - 1.5 Mbit real-life transfer rates. According to the survey software, the QoS is barely "Low" because of the bad positioning of the antennas. (contractor should be showing up this week to put up proper masts).

This stuff is unbelieveable. I took my laptop across the street (about 800ft through 2 sets of double-paned glass) to Tim Hortons for coffee, and had 3Mbit connection to the LAN. It was just as fast as my wired connection (marginally busy 10Mbit ethernet).

One of our clients is starting to offer Wireless Internet Access in Southern Ontario ... check out WDSL Inc.

Use IPSec with 3DES!

[Cato]

I'd strongly recommend you implement IPSec with 3DES (168 bit keys) between all wireless LAN nodes. I think the WEP encryption has a fairly pathetic keylength (40 bits?) and in any case the usual arguments about open source crypto apply. Even if you use a closed source IPSec on Windows, at least IPSec has been publicly reviewed. Bruce Schneier has reviewed IPSec and was quite critical of its complexity and other problems, but admitted it is the 'least worst' option (see http://www.counterpane.com for his interesting paper on this).

I'd recommend using IPSec's ESP + authentication, and not bothering with AH, which cannot go through NATs or IP Masquerading. You can use ESP tunnels to go right through a NAT and support wired or other VPN access to your home network.

I'd prefer to use tunnel mode even within the LAN, which is also a Schneier recommendation - then you have a clear distinction between encrypted and unencrypted interfaces - if you see any packets between non-tunnelled IP addresses, you know at once they weren't encrypted.

I haven't got this set up at home yet (still waiting for a colleague to dig out his free Nokia WLAN card - they were giving them away at Interop last September) but I will real soon now. I did use BayStack 650 cards at the IETF last year, but these don't have Linux support.

In a sense, all wireless access is dialin, since anyone can just fake a MAC address, stand next to your house and get right in to your network, so strong VPN support is a Good Thing - you might want to make your Wireless LAN gateway sit outside your firewall perhaps.

There are IPSec implementations for Linux, *BSD (check out http://www.freeswan.org/ for Linux and http://www.openbsd.org/ for OpenBSD), and many commercial ones for Windows (I think PGPnet is a free VPN client for Windows but it's only available in US).

One other thing to think about is DSSS vs FHSS - these are two variants of spread spectrum (direct sequence and frequency hopping) - cards can be 802.11 compatible and use either, but the two types cannot communicate... DSSS appears to be winning for 802.11 (2 Mbps version) but there's some questionmark over the allocation of spectrum for 802.11b DSSS (but I could have mis-remembered that last bit).

Wireless LANs are definitely the future - the standards are a huge mess, though. Things to check out include HomeRF (includes SWAP), BRAN (formerly HiperLAN 2, from ETSI), Bluetooth, and more, including the whole mobile phone saga of HSCSD, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, and so on. But 802.11 seems to have a fairly good niche in Wireless LANs, so it will probably do OK.

Some WLAN vendors are talking to telcos about rolling this out to hotels and airports - the idea is you just walk into the place, sign on to your existing ISP (if they serve that area) or put in a credit card number on a web page, and then you're on the Net at 2 Mbps or higher.

Re:Use IPSec with 3DES!

[Keeper ofthe Keys]

One other thing to think about is DSSS vs FHSS - these are two variants of spread spectrum (direct sequence and frequency hopping) - cards can be 802.11 compatible and use either, but the two types cannot communicate... DSSS appears to be winning for 802.11 (2 Mbps version) but there's some questionmark over the allocation of spectrum for 802.11b DSSS (but I could have mis-remembered that last bit).

The problem with DSSS is that it uses 26 out of 78 available frequencies in the ISM band (un-regulated). Although some vendors are claiming that they can have 11 channels, what this means is the Starting frequency can be from frequency 1 to frequency 11. It also means that if you don't start on frequency *1* you are limited to only *2* channels in the entire spectrum. This covers ALL users of wireless in your physical area.

ISM Frequencies (2.4Ghz)
1-----------26------------52-----------78

3 channels
|-----------||------------||------------|
....wlan1........wlan2..........wlan3

2 channels
|-----------| |-----------|
......wlan1............wlan2

note that there is no room for a third channel in the bandwidth available.

This also means that if you have ANY external interference (microwave ovens, etc) in the path of connections, then your available bandwidth will be seriously restricted.



With FHSS, this is not nearly as much of an issue, since it jumps between all 78 frequencies, and if busy, just picks another. Theoretically the limit is 26 overlapping networks, but in reality this is probably limited to about 16 before units spend more time colliding (like ethernet) than transmitting.



Wireless internet access in southern ontario now! WDSL Inc.

IPSec encrypts everything

[Cato]

I forgot to say that IPSec can encrypt all IP traffic on your WLAN, just about. Some things, such as broadcasts or multicasts, may have problems, but generally it just works.

You can use all your normal applications, and there's no need for SSH on the LAN.

Better range through antenna mods

[dingbat_hp]

if you replace the [...] antenna [...] you can massively extend the range.

I'm impressed with 15km !, although I've done this myself on similar kit with good, but lesser, results. My experience was in the UK with MPT1340 pre-built modules at 418MHz (car alarm / door opener tech) - maybe the use of spread spectrum for the wireless LAN accounts for your greater success ? (all hail Hedy)

still be within regulations.

Now this I'm not so sure about. Certainly UK rules for the MPT1340 are very specific about keeping with the standard antennae designs they were certified with (not that it stopped me !). Some of the model rocket fliers and ferret keepers who use these things as retrieval homing beacons have built massive reception Yagi arrays.

Wirles LAN Hack FAQ. Yes Please !

Used at IETF

[Lon_]

At IETF45 in Oslo last summer wireless LAN was used a lot, also by Linux users. Kind of old information now, but perhaps still of some interest:

http://www.uninett.no/ietf45/wlan/

I use Symbol Spectrum24 card at work, on my laptop running Linux. Works nice.

Lucent WaveLAN works well

[Phrack]

I've been running the Lucent cards for several months now with no issues. I only have the 2 Mb cards, but since the WAN portion is still under that, I haven't noticed any problems. Sure beats re-wiring the house!

Re:Ethernet wires

[Anonymous Coward]

>I thought Ethernet made do with 2. No?

Coax 1 strand

Ethernet Twisted Pair usually 8 were 4 are in use.

Re:Aviator WebGear 2.4 .... W inProxy?

[kpooley]

How well does WinProxy work? Are there big speed losses? Is there quick, or not quick, way to share IP under linux? Outpost has the kit for 169.95 but there is that always popular free overnight shipping....I totally pine for wireless access for my laptop but don't have much interest in having to run winders everytime I need to get to my ISP...though I might could see letting a server run winders if it would feed my laptop....

Re:Aviator WebGear 2.4 .... W inProxy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there quick, or not quick, way to share IP under linux?

The IP Masquerading HOWTO is a good place to start.

Re:Does IEEE 802.11 mean they all play well togeth

[frog51]

Afraid not! Symbol and Telxon have worked with some tweaking in some major food stores, but their abilities have to be limited and seamless roaming isn't exactly that.

Different countries hardware is NOT compatible. The US has "fry your brain" signal levels. Europe has 4 different frequency band standards (and France which is a law unto itself.) The base hardware works, but you need to replace the radio card in all cases!!!

We have bridges

[frog51]

11 Mb/sec ethernet bridges from Symbol and Telxon come in around £800 (or $800 in the states) and are basically plug'n'play (although you can configure the clever snmp gubbins if you want through telnet or html)

Re:HOWTO?? - Corporate Internet + Mobile Connectiv

[frog51]

VPN's are good - easy to access from anywhere, not just WLAN.
But if you go for one Access Point inside the firewall, it is easy to set up both ends - the AP has access control lists and both the AP and radio NIC have to have a radio ESS ID programmed. Devices will only talk to others on the same ESS network.
Then add the fact that the hop set and hop sequence (for frequency hopping) or the chipping code (for direct sequence) make for some fairly unique numbers it does tie things down pretty well.

Re:Wireless support under linux (Aironet WEP)

[Anonymous Coward]

Both the Linux driver and the Aironet PC4500 & PC4800 cards support WEP. See http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~breed/airo.html .

IPSec on Linux

[Cato]

Have a look at http://www.freeswan.org/ - this is a relatively complete implementation of IPSec for Linux - includes IKE for key exchanges but no PKI support yet.

Re:Aviator WebGear 2.4 .... W inProxy?

[kpooley]

Sure enough and it is a good Howto...thanks...

PCMCIA in Non-mobile Platforms

[Pii]

Don't Panic...

You can get a PC Card socket for PCI bus as well. You're not limited to an ISA only solution.

Brumley and Associates sells both the ISA and the PCI adapter for Desktop/Tower computers. If I remember correctly, they go for $66.00 each.

But there's nothing special about the adapter... It's just a pcmcia controller, and socket. There's nothing about it that's specific to the WaveLAN card. I could easily go plug my modem into it.

WaveLab "Aviator 2.4" kit

[seebs]

Wow! 2 cards, 2 ISA adapters, $140 at CompUSA, and they even work with NetBSD and Linux.

This looks like a pretty good deal. They're not as good as the higher-end cards, I'm told, but they still seem pretty neat.

Currently setting up my NetBSD gateway machine to be a gateway to one more network...

yo

[DeeezNutz]

yo