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Lucent to Offer Cheap Wavelan Cards
Glarvat the Hepcat writes, "Lucent is preparing to sell new 11 Mbps cards at costs to rival some of the 2 Mbps cards such as WebGear. They also are supposed to be also to handle distances of up to 1500 feet. Released to select retailers by late March. " Recently we ordered a few Lucent cards at the Geek Compound to test them out. The impressive thing about these things is that Wavelan has Linux drivers: Source code and all. How many vendors have tarballs on their sites? The hardware gateways are fairly expensive, but simply setting them up peer to peer and using IP Masqing works pretty well. I haven't tested the range but they quite quick.
"The list price of the ORINOCO PC Card is $179; the PCI and ISA adapter are $69 each, and the RG-1000 Residential Gateway is $349." The price doesn't seem too bad at all.
Lets stop praying for someone to save us and save ourselves. ~KMFDM
- Think for yourself, question authority.-
How well would these work in conjunction with a USB network? Don't USB networks operate at 11MBps? (Or is it 12?)
kwsNI
Very interesting. I'm getting my ADSL connection installed tomorrow, with the box being downstairs and the computer being 3 flights away from it I'm going to run into a bit of trouble. The ADSL box works a little like an Ascend pipeline, from what I gather, so my machine thinks it's wired to the network and knows nothing about ADSL whatsoever - I could put my FreeBSD box downstairs and IP MASQ over wireless upstairs. A bit fo a waste of a computer in the porch, though. Does anyone know if it's at all possible using something similar to this kind of kit to have a wireless link to a network port in the wall without havign a second comptuer to route through? In other words, trying to replace the traditional cable with a wireless link? Dave.
http://www.sflan.com/
Also, the @stake folks doing Guerilla Networking.
Also, the Midcoast (Maine) Internet folks, although they've standardized on Breezecom.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Does anyone know if these things are available outside the US (e.g., .nl) for reasonable prices? Are the US units compatible with the ones sold in Europe or do they operate in a different frequency band (like cell phones)?
--
bgphints - internet routing news, hints and ti
The source they released for linux does not contain things such as power optimizations. There is an object code version too though.
With the mass adoption of Bluetooth, Lucent has to do something to maintain market share. As well, rumor has it that a Bluetooth wireless network will knock out an 802.11 network. Can anyone confirm this rumour?
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
We just setup a wirless network to connect some of the small group housing here at the College. We're using the Lucent WaveLan Turbo Silver 11Mbs cards in P100 linux routers and they work great! It was a relatively quick and easy setup, I just wish I could figure out how to get mrouted (multicast routing) working so the students can log into the Netware servers. Anyone have any ideas (the HOWTOs are no help so don't point me there)?
:) And you guys thought DSL was nice, heh!
As a side note, I will be getting one of these nice 11 meg links to my house shortly.
-jay
I've worked with some 802.11, and it's interesting how much fun you can have with a low wattage, high frequency device. If you can find a way to hack the antenna on the device so that you can connect a higher gain antenna, you can get much greater distance out of the device, albeit much more directionally biased. I'd be interested to see if these cards can handle something like a 13-23dBi antenna, cause you could get some *mad* distances with that, something on the order of a few miles. I've seen it done with the more expensive units - I'd buy these cards if they could do the same.
XenoWolf The Original - Since 1993
Maybe wireless networking will become a reality.
---------- I laugh at a dumb SysAdmin.
It is very cool, You can hook up high-gain directional antennas to the bridges and get upto a 5 mile (I got 1.8 mi. easily) point-to-point wireless link. Might want to check if the frequency if FCC OK first though - I worked for the USAF, so it didn't matter to me < grin >.
Specifications do not mention Linux support. Several other OSes are listed...although one is "Novel" and the "Windows CE" product no longer uses that name.
The wavelan drivers are now currently in the standard pcmcia-cs distribution too. And from my experience they work just as well as the ones from Lucent.
-jay
I need to get my home computers networked and I am a little worried about bombarding my house w. radio waves 24/7.
Between my cordless phones and a wavelan network, I am thinking about subjecting my family to a very large dose of 2.4Ghz.
Can anyone give my pointers to studies showing that 2.4Ghz transmiters are completely harmless to people (esp pregnant women and small children) cats, fish and plants????
Thanks!
trikster2@hotmail.com
The ISA/PCI adapter is delivered as a sole adapter; the PC card, which completes the solution, has to be ordered as a separate item.
So that comes to around $250 per machine, plus the gateway. A little rich for my blood still....
I don't see this as much more than a re-introduction than their Bronze line of Wavelan cards. The announcement doesn't mention anything about encryption and the price isn't even that good. At CDW you can pick up a Wavelan Gold PCMCIA card for $190 and you get 128 bit hardware encryption. The Bronze(no encryption), is only $128, much cheaper than their "intro" price of $179 for PC cards. The only good thing I see of this is that they are finally releasing their PCI cards, as I can't seem to find them anywhere. I'll definately be picking some of these up for my Workpad z50.
Dodger_
At the Tcl/Tk Conference in Austin (Feb 13-18), Usenix provided a free Aironet wireless network. They had about 100 (I don't think they ran out) 11Mb PCMCIA cards that you could check out. You gave them your credit card and if you didn't return them, they would charge you $395. They provided drivers for Windows, Linux, BSD and Mac.
They worked well when they worked, but they had a pretty limited range. They didn't work, for example, at the podium and thus no presenters were able to do any "real" demonstrations.
This was the first time Usenix tried offering such a service, so it's understandable that it wasn't perfect. I hope they continue to offer this service, but don't think they're close to eliminating traditional network services just yet.
PS: The ISP was jump.net.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I'm wondering if it's strictly necessary to buy one of the base stations if I already have a "router" machine? From what I can garner from the specs on the cards, it should work but I'm not sure if there is some subtle requirement for the base station.
James
Of course you need to buy the PCI/ISA adapter and the PC card. I'm not sure what the purpose of the Gateway is, because I know I could just use sygate with the PCI/ISA adapter to gain internet access on any lan. If anybody would like to explain the purpose of the gateway, please go ahead and explain it for me:)
Lets stop praying for someone to save us and save ourselves. ~KMFDM
- Think for yourself, question authority.-
Glow in the dark.
Parents Against Kuro5hin
What's with all the hullaballoo here? We have these at work (for a few months now), not the inexpensive one's listed here, but 11 mbs nonetheless, and we RARELY, no, more like NEVER get an 11mbs connection. On a good day we get 4, but more often than not, 2. Not trying to start a flame war, just my $.02
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
Unfortunately the Lucent drivers are binary only.
The "source" tarball contains a skeleton C code which links against a binary module to do the actual work.
So, you get all the great disadvantages of binary drivers: x86 only, no support for Linux 2.3 or BSD, etc, etc...
The older generation of WaveLan cards have been supported by a truly open source driver for years now
Bluetooth was not meant for short-haul peer to peer lans. It was designed to go short distances (~10ft or so) for interconnecting personal computing devices. It will link things like PDAs, cellphones, digital cameras, and other personal gadgets. Think of it like IrDA but without the Ir.
I was wondering ... what the maximum theoretical bandwidth of air?
I'm really glad to see this. I'm from southwest Virginia, and our best bet at broadband might be LMDS (Virginia Tech bought the spectum licenses for this end of the state and parts of surrounding states). LMDS (Local Multipoint Distribution Service) uses the 802.11 standard and is really cool. Right now the equipment is really expensive. Of course we need a lot more range but low priced local wirless cards are a good start. Watch out. . . the hillbilies are coming online ;-) (I can say that cause i is one.)
The company I work for actually sells gateways too www.wilinx.com
Their cards are based on the ignitio chipsets, which makes it quite performant and stable under Linux...
And they've been doing so long before the linux hyped.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
Well the standard drivers seem to work really well with our 802.11 cards. The 802.11 drivers I think have only been included in the last two releases (3.1.9 and 3.1.10 I think). Please seen /
http://www.fasta.fh-dortmund.de/users/andy/wvla
as per the pcmcia-cs documentation.
-jay
Thanks for the info....very appreciated.
Lets stop praying for someone to save us and save ourselves. ~KMFDM
- Think for yourself, question authority.-
Here at our university we measured the range of the Wavelan produkts years ago. This new 11 Mbps still won't cover more then 40 Meters inside a building. Solid walls cannot be penetrated with the signal strength of only 100mW@2.4GHz . When the WaveLANs are used outdoors, the range is increased to 500 meters or more provided there is line of sight. We also tested that a small FM signal can block all the communication of the supposed robust CDMA radio.
Probably the big break will come from bluetooth this standard is technically superiour to the IEEE commity design. It is cheap enough to be build into laptops, PDAs, mp3 players, etc.
The Linux driver for the WaveLAN cards are only partly distributed in source code. A binairy exists in the distribution to talk to their MAC chip. They will not disclose the interface to they propierary chipset...
Just my 5 eurocents...
Johan.
Sooo... why couldn't a linux box do the same thing?
Hello,
I'm thinking about possibly wireless networking a few computers in my house. The trouble is that it is a rather large house with old fashion walls (e.g., thick and plaster) and i'm not too sure how capable these cards are in such an environment. Anyone have experience with this? I'd need to run the main card on my linux box (e.g., need linux support), and, say, 2 PC PCI cards, and one laptop card. What might this cost? What brand would you recommend? I'd like to get atleast 10mbps, if it doesn't cost too much.
I'd appreciate any advice. Thanks
They quite quick.
For lucent company nice
Wavelan opensource drivers for Linux has
Distances up to 1500 feet they handle
Vendor tarballs on their site has
Hi, this is a serious question:
If I already have a box acting as a (cable modem-) router/firewall/masquing machine and put a PC card into that one, so all the other talk to that as my gateway, why would I need the extra "Residential Gateway" with a $350 price tag? Does it have some extra functionality or is that the price of a box doing what I described? Maybe can it handle masquing the dreaded H323 protocol (Netmeeting et al)??
Insight would appreciated.
Roland
This seems like a great option for those home users with both iBook's / Powermacs, and their linux / unix boxes and laptops.
The cost of the airport is cheaper than the mentioned wavelan base, but I have heard it doesn't work quite as well. Anyways, to each his own.
Ben Brewer
brewer@nullified.org & tidepool@suspicious.org
It requires a Mac running MacOS 8.6 or higher to initially configure the Airport Basestation, but since I set it to run in bridging mode on startup it has run perfectly without a Mac around.
At this time, this was the cheapest way to get the Lucent cards on a bridged solution as neither the Lucent nor GPL driver can currently run the card in promiscuous mode (necessary for the kernel bridging code).
I just received my Webgear Aviator 2Mbps cards last week and they work well but 2 Mbps is a little slow for my desktop machines. With 11 Mbps I'm tempted to get rid of all those nasty cables...
Dell article: http://www1.pcworld.com/pcwtoday/article/0,1510,1
L0pht (@stake)'s wireless network.
Midcoast Wireless
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I didn't read /. articles more than that main page announcement, and decided to be initiative today. I sometimes tell to Hardware Vendors about that Certification, so they might even notify it's existence.
And I do this because I like to see more Open Hardware. I like to see the kind of future where every Hardware Vendor must release specs of their product - if they want to get significant market share. That's my share of doing something toward it.
That's my copy of feedback to that Vendor:
The Dutch company No Wires Needed has some excellent hardware. I belief Compaq is buying their stuff now. At the following site you can find a Linux driver for their Swallow 550. http://www.xs4all.nl/~bvermeul/swallow/
Use Adsense for Charity
We have the 11mbps cards with outdoor attennas hooking up two buildings about 2000 feet apart. Actual throughput seems to be about 4-5 mbps (with latency in the 3-4ms range). You should see the shielding on the attenna wire running from the roof. About 7/8 inch outside diameter, about 2mm inside diameter.
I ordered a Webgear Aviaitor kit last week (backordered from buy.com). As near as I can figure, for around $150 this kit gives you two PCMCIA cards AND two ISA adapters that can be used with these PCMCIA cards to put them in a desktop. They run at 2MByte (not MBit) per second. Extra cards for new "nodes" run around $75 each.
This is much slower then the cards announced here, but you can do an awfull lot with 2MB per second, and this $150 price will be darn hard to beat.
My current plan is to take an old 486 laptop with only 8MB ram and small hard drive and install a Linux configuration that includes only kernal, networking, and an X server.
The window manager (Gnome/Enlightenment) and all my applications will then run on my server in the basement, with the display pointed to the laptop. As a side note, this type of configuration is supported by default by Linux, but is at best a terrible kludge with winXX.
This will make the laptop a thin client that can sit on the kitchen table, or roam around the house, but with the full power of my server at my fingertips.
The big drawback will be the 640x480 resolution of the older laptop system, but I can work with that. The 8Mb on the laptop will likely just barely enough to handle managing the display and networking code.
Adding a cheap and semi-legal low power FM broadcasting homebuilt kit to the sound card on the same server should allow me to set up a simple web based interface to play any of my MP3's and pick them up with a walkman, or any other stereo in the house.
Note that this solution is totally tweaked towards bang for the buck, not high performance (sound quality, bandwidth, etc).
However, it is dirt cheap (should be able to do the whole deal for less then $200), and all relies on proven, flexible, and established technology, and will likely be plenty "good enough". Support for the Webgear Aviatior cards is opensource (as far as I can tell), and is already a part of the kernel (as far as I can tell).
If anyone is interested in the nuts and bolts of this procedure once I get everything working, I will be happy to post detailed instructions and parts sources on my site. The kit is backordered, so it could show up tomorrow, or sometime next century.
Bill Kilgallon
Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
Why bother though. You've got to set up and administer the box, with both a WaveLan system and a regular Ethernet card. If you use the gateway, it will do it for you. Same result, different approach. Also, in most cases, I think the Linux PC would be more expensive, unless you already have one lying around.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
If the linux box was set up properally it could probably do the same thing (I haven't tried personally so can't say for certain). We sell the product for those who don't want to have to set it up themselves.
Check it out at http://world.std.com/~corey/raylink.html
I only post this because the story seems to suggest that only the wavelan cards are supported under Linux.
Of course, the WebGear Aviator 2.4 cards that I have are only 2 Mbps, but that's good enough for me, because I'm using them to share a 256 kbps DSL connection. And I think they're a lot cheaper - I got 2 cards + 2 isa-pcmcia adapters for $110 at CrapUSA (that includes a $40 rebate).
The Aviator 2.4 cards are also supported by NetBSD, and it shouldn't take all that much work to get the NetBSD driver to work for OpenBSD and FreeBSD.
Hmm, perhaps because the gateway is something you just plug in and it works? No installing an OS, keeping it current with patches, worrying about the hard drive dying, etc. There are some things in life that are just better served by dedicated special purpose devices rather than a multipurpose PC running Unix.
I agree that Bluetooth is not intended as a short haul LAN technology, but it be little surprise if end up adopting this role in certain areas.
My reasons are: 1) Bluetooth has a mass market appeal, it will be very cheap, and it will be ubiquitous and have a lot of technology and support behind it, therefore it will be economically viable, if not entirely technological viable (the market place does not always care about technical purity). 2) Bluetooth may not become a short haul LAN technology in the work place, but in the home, I think that it will prevail. 802.11 will likely not become a player in the home market; and remain a player in commercial and "industrial" arena. The home market does not care about "LANs", people just want to entertainment and other facilities to connect together. Why have different wireless technologies when everything can fit under the Bluetooth banner 3) Bluetooth is being sped up (no surprises here) so will run at faster rates, although at the moment it runs at about 734kbps (once protocol overheads are removed from the wire rate of 1Mbps).
With the proliferation of wireless devices like this, it seems to be more important than ever to make sure that we aren't sending unencrypted packets between machines.
Does the 802.11 spec cover this, or is it just a connectivity protocol for wireless devices (I assume the latter)?
900 MHz cordless phones have made claims to some sort of encryption for years, but I don't take what they put on the box at face value -- I suspect it's pretty weak stuff.
Can somebody provide some pointers to IP-level cryptography? I'll be wanting to go with an in-home set up like this in the near future but I really chafe at the idea of how trivially easy it would be for people to sniff my packets. I realize that encryption is easily built into higher-level protocols, but I really like the idea of minimum disclosure to eavesdroppers, particularly for signals that otherwise wouldn't even leave my home (not everything is outbound to the ISP, you know).
Address-collecting spam robots don't know how to crack ROT13. Do you?
A couple things:
I just installed these things for the first time on friday, and was thoroughly impressed. They're working well in our industrial complex, despite poor placement on our part (haven't run any benchmarks yet, it could be dropping to a lower speed).
A couple observations: The gateway is really just a little bridge. Don't plan on getting 11Mbps out of it though-- it has a 10BaseT interface on the other side! Perhaps someone could put together a nice little embedded linux solution. :)
Also, you're back to shared media days. It's like putting everyone on a 10Mb hub. I don't know if there's any way to get it to scale (probably not if they all use one frequency) by breaking it down into more networks.
- Matt Ingenthron
Is the lack of promiscuous mode because of the driver, or the hardware? Does Lucent not want people putting a $200 card in their Linux box to replace a $1000 base station?
hey, this'll make it cheaper to make a beowolf cluster out of whatever the last article was about :D
---
11 MB is pokey. In a world of 100baseT and right at the edge of Gigabit ethernet, these things are the modern equivalent of the pathetic Appletalk (aka pokeytalk) that those wobbly old Macs used when we were all on 10baseT.
The fact that they're wireless makes a little bit of difference, but not much. Wireless with a six mile range would mean something. Wireless with a range of a thousand feet means the wife won't complain as much about the vaccum cleaner running over the cables. Translation- no big deal.
How cheap are they going to sell them? I haul home obsolete 10baseT boards from work for free if I want them.
Since one of the machines is literally at ground level, I don't get impressive outdoor range (particularly to the west, through most of the house), but I can go anywhere indoors and get to the net, and I managed to get fairly far down the block in the other direction before my on-its-last-legs laptop battery conked out.
So let's see... from my gateway to my laptop, I need:
$179 card for the laptop
$179 card for the PC
$69 cheesy pcmcia adapter for PC
----
$427 for the minimum setup..
Ack. Don't you hate it when post-IPO dot-com-ers decide for you what's "cheap?"
---
There are some things in life that are just better served by dedicated special purpose devices rather than a multipurpose PC running Unix.
get a rope
The cool thing about this reader is that I can have two PCMCIA slots on the FRONT (it goes in a 3.5 or 5.25" drive bay -- adapter included) of my PC, so I can also read things like digital camera flash cards. This is an ISA card, btw but then again it's only PCMCIA so you can't expect really high bandwidth.
Overall, the installation of the hardware took 15 minutes and configuring/compiling the software/drivers took around 3 hours after poking around to get ad-hoc networking up. After that it's been extremely reliable and very tolarant of me pulling out the card and reinserting it on the fly.
I found this web page really helpful for the configuration: here .
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
For $169 I got two WebGear Aviator 2.4's, and two ISA controller cards, and free overnight shipping...can someone explain how $179 for one card compares?
The other day, I was going to post an "Ask Slashdot" to see if anyone had tried to use Nokia Wireless LAN products, if anyone knew if they were planning to explicitly support Linux, and how best to pressure them to do so. Sounds like it will be easier given the fact that we can point to Lucent support for Linux.
If anyone has any answers to the questions I asked above, let me know.
--
Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
So is Enya the spokesperson for that new product? "We can surf, we can surf
Surf away! Surf away! Surf away!"
Look,
My wife literaly uses her laptop on of all things her lap. I don't care how low the power is, proximity has to count for something. If you had a pregnant wife would YOU feel confortable putting a wavelan card in her laptop?
Course I don't care what you feel, but point me to some studies showing long term exposure to low power close proximity 2.4Ghz is harmless to pregnant woman, and I will read them.
Otherwise, I'll probably go with either ripping up my house to install 100-Base-T, OR try one of the less than stellar phone or powerline solutions...
Keep on Keeping On
The pieces are all coming together to establish an anarchic wireless internet-alike.
i)Get yourself and all your friends these cards.
ii)Fit a higher-powered directional antenna as described in other posts on this thread, so
that you can make at least a surburb-wide network. Hopefully, with time, this 'burb sized networks will grow together.
iii)Set up an encrypted (IPSec) IPv6 network running over this framework (IPv6 so we have enough numbers to go round without crazy masquerading setups)
iv) Help develop+ install the freenet server/client on all machines, as well as standard DNS stuff. (Think of freenet as a sortof fully decentralised napster, but even cooler)
v) laugh at the censors.
I believe l0pht have been working on such a scheme for some time, but only now are the pieces really coming together.
Touching on the matter of security: Would setting these networks up mean that we'd have to worry about somebody standing outside the house and hacking the network inside?
I know someone else asked about packet level encryption but how much would we lose in throughput with that versus having the network secure?
Also, (to emit a few random paranoia particles), couldn't the government just do drive-by monitoring of personal networks? (Slowly of course so as not "break" the connection.)
Or even worse set up a large receiver station! (Yes I know it would also pick up everyone's microwaves but the government's been known to build larger annoyances - see Echelon.) I personally wouldn't want that!
Would there be any way for us to protect our data?
The Tick - "Spoon!"
"Bah!" - Dogbert
my company is using wavelan extensively with linux, we actually have wavelan connecting two store on seperate islands, in the virgin islands and it seems to work quite well.
The reason the guy mentions having to 'hack' a new antenna is because, by FCC regulations, unlicenced ISM band devices must use a non-standard antenna connector. They do this, on purpose, so that some dumbwit (it's unlicensed.. so there's no guarantee the end user has any clue whatsoever) doesn't hook it up to a linear amplifier, or to his TV, or somethign else, and cause something bad to happen.
And these cards should be able to do the same. There is no reason they wouldn't.
That will work, but "ad hoc" mode (which is the "no base station" mode) misses out on a few things you get when you have the access-point/basestation thing.
So if you are using unpluged laptops, a base station will can increse your battery life. If you have problems getting the range you want a base station can help that too.
a ck-off thing. B will hear both messages, but they will damage each other, so all B will realy hear is a really long collison. With an access point (either where B is, or close by) it will mediate A and C's demands to talk. The RTS (request to send) is a ver short message so the chances of collisons when sending them is quite low. There is a slight increse in latency this way.
* The hidden transmitter is where you have, say, three machines, A, B, and C. A can hear B but not C, C and hear B but not A, and B can hear both. If A and C both talk they don't hear each other, so they won't do the ehternet I-heard-a-collision-while-I-was-talking-so-I'll-b
CMU has a very large deployment of Lucent Wavelan (using it right now!). Since these things can hop between different frequencies ("channels"), it's possible to put a few stations in a lecture hall so that everyone doesn't have to share one frequency. Through careful planning it's possible to spread the signal out arbitrarily far (most of our campus is covered, even outside).
Check out http://www.cmu.edu/computing/wireless/ -- they talk a bit about what they do to scale.
If you're agonizing over the price of a base station, Apple's AirPort is based on the Lucent WaveLan Silver card, is platform agnostic, and only costs $299. Let Apple's Loss Leader be your gain!
Kevin Fox
As another reader pointed out, this is just a re-launch of the same old product at a slightly better price point.
- 38B32E12-prod1
Still, $179 per PCMCIA card plus $69 per ISA Host Adapter means $496 (not even including software) for essentially a similar product to the Webgear Aviator 2.4 package, which I picked up at my local CompUSA for $139! Sure, the Wavelans are probably better constructed and may get better throughput, but 2Mbit is plenty for home use (believe me) and the price difference is STILL staggering!
I'm just astounded by the value of the Webgear Aviator 2.4 package. You get two 802.11- compatable cards with Linux support, two ISA PCMCIA adapters, and some Windows software for less than a single competing PCMCIA WLAN card costs! PLUS it's available at every CompUSA so you don't have to bother mail-ordering...
By the way, if you go looking for these Aviator 2.4 packs on the CompUSA shelves, forget it. You have to ask at the parts desk for some crazy reason. And make sure you get the Aviator 2.4 and not the nasty old parallel-port 900MHz Aviator.
Check out my Epinions review at:
http://www.epinions.com/cmd-review-3A1E-314C776
Wireless LAN just RULES!
PedXing
1. I didn't have enough time to read all posts, so if this is a repeat, just moderate down.
2. I can't be 100% certain of what I say, as I haven't personally tested it.
That said:
The Apple airport system (including the base stations...which are only $399) should work quite well with these cards as the Airport conforms to the same standard (802.11 DSSS) I believe, and the apple prods are actually lucent stuff repackaged.
The base station is, to me the best part. While your range may not be 1500 feet (which is way overkill for most home situations...who needs a quarter mile?) it's a bit cheaper.
anyway...I'm looking forward to get my hands on one of these to test out the compatability.
-FP
Which model of card do you use? (e.g. Aviator2.4, etc.)? If I locate the "hub" in my room, I'd need to cover atleast 50 feet horizontally through a couple walls/rooms, and up one floor too. Ideally, I'd like to locate it in my basement and network my entire house like that (2-3 floors). What kind of speed do you think I could expect in this situation? And are you using Linux as the hub (I need to run NAT/ipmasqing)? Had something else I wanted to ask, but I forget now....
thanks
People who use high power with this are EVIL. They should just accept the fact that the phone company is going to rape them in the ass and smile! I mean, if you could run say 5 watts then why buy a T1?? Shit, a lot of the T1s around here would be just a big waste of cash to keep around. I mean you should just be incredibly happy get the joy of paying $16 or more a month for outdated analog trash. The phone company loves the consumer!
I'd rather use an AirPort - I have one at work, one at home, they work like a dream, and my laptop (linux of couse) picks up the network with absolutely no worries. This article doesn't say anything about encryption, and the prices look about the same. Not such a good deal... especially if you can't configure *their* base station with a Linux box. I've heard rumours that you can configure the AirPort base station through SNMP... anyone have info?
I have ISM stuff that has 'N' connectors on it. Pretty fucking common if you ask me.
Make the walls out of lead if you're looking to avoid the side-effects.
A simple Faraday cage will do. If you haven't got tons of steel concrete forming a cage around you, you can always sleep in the car.
In my army times I once walked in front of a Russian-built AA-missile control center's radar thing. The microwave transmitter was huge. I can swear I felt a hummmmmm going in my head.
While cpu Power Suplies etc are not designed to transmit they do emit something.
How does the power of one of these 2.4Ghz low power transmitters compare to the EMF already emitted from common electronic appliances such as a laptop.
It's my understanding that computers are shielded, however shielding is aimed not at health but preventing interference w. TV or radio, so one wonders how effective the shielding is for anything outside those frequencies.
Anyone care to comment?
For my part, I'll most likely go through the trouble of wiring my house, better safe than sorry!
> Why bother though. ...
Well, maybe if you already had a Linux box as a gateway to your DSL/cable/dial-up connection...
// TODO: fix sig
Wavelan is about $1,100 for 3 PCs vs $20-90 per Ethernet adapter plus $90 for a hub plus $0.50/ft for cable x 200 ft or so plus $25 per RJ-45 termination plus 40-100 hours of your own labor. So even if your labor is free the price difference is about 500 bucks. The difference decreases as you add more PCs.
Hi, I'm planning on wireless networking my house. I'd like to use my Linux box for NAT/ipmasing, and connect wintel PCs and laptops. If I could use this, that would kick ass.
in case you're not sure what I need to know. I'm not that familiar with these wireless networking technologies yet. Do I need one of those hubs/access points, or can I just plug the "client" PC card into my Linux box, and use that as my NAT. Also, where did you order it from... Any advice, problems, latency issues, speed, etc....
Thanks
I'm sure it has been mentioned, but in case not... The Apple Airport base station is available for ~250 dollars via mail order and is completely compatible with Lucent Wavelan products. The only issue is administration must be done from a Mac. Unless you'd want to write software of course :-)
A good deal for a cheap hardware access point supporting NAT, DHCP, Bridging, ISP dialup sharing etc...
The truth will set you free.
You bring up an interesting point. Consider that microwaves operate at 2.4GHz. Wireless lans operate at 2.4GHz. Now, microwave ovens are in use around here, but haven't caused me a problem in the past;
however, if some nut decides to take his loud 2.4GHz oven apart and aim the waveguide in my general direction, my crystal controlled 2.4GHz connection can be expected to fail.
The Apple Airport BaseStation works fine with the Lucent Cards. Rumor has it that the BaseStation is SNMP aware. Has anyone found a MIB for the BaseStation?
RAM5
Has anyone tried these cards with Apple's AirPort? Both are supposed to use IEEE 802.11.
I have (quite) a few of the IBM Wireless Entry cards, and I'm hooking them into my Ethernet network via a Windows machine. He, he, it's a 386SX with 8M and a 120M HD running Win95, without a case--strapped the whole mobo, PS and PCMCIA card reader to a wooden board on a shelf.
I'm running Win95 because there never were any working Linux drivers for the IBM cards. With DUN 1.2 and later Win95 can do IP forwarding between Ethernet cards (only! won't work with TokenRing etc, I've tried it). Takes the machine a good 40 seconds to boot, but since the bridging is all it's doing, the 386 is plenty, and it's rock solid. Cost? $10 for the PS, $70 for the card reader (2 years ago). What self-respecting geek doesn't have a closet-full of 386 and 486 boards, so there's no cost there.
It's lucky that Win95 can forward IP, otherwise there would be no joy with a lot of the wireless cards out there. Few have Linux drivers, and fewer still publish the specs.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
If you want a good cheap 2Mbit card score some WebGear cards. They have the FULL source out on their page and links to the most up to date source. I also hear that their drivers will be in the 2.4kernels. And for ~$140 (CompUSA) you get 2 PCMCIA WLAN cards AND 2 PCMCIA to ISA cards...NEW. Ive been using them with linux for a wile with no probs.
I have to return some videotapes...
True, microwave ovens don't mutate your food (much). The microwave frequency is centered on the hydrogen vibration frequency of a water molecule -- the two hydrogen atoms in H2O aren't in a rigid alignment. The microwave energy intensifies the vibration thus heating the substance -- temperature equals average kenetic energy. This has the net effect of driving the water out of most things -- take for example, bread... need I say more?
However, water is not the only "perfect receiver". Sugar also absorbes the microwave energy very well. So well in fact, that the "water" in the sugar can be wrenched out of the sugar molecules leaving behind the carbon. (It's a fun experiment, but I'm not responsible for any damage to your microwave, person, house, pets, etc.)
This brings me to the non-ionizing radiation part... This is true. The microwave signal isn't going to hit a strand of DNA and break it like a gamma ray. However, many of the molecular substances in the human body will absorb microwave energy and eventually be damaged. In your example of standing infront of a microwave with the door open, if you stood there long enough, it would blind you. (Of course, if you stood there "too long", your blood would boil and you would subsequently explode -- odds are, you'd already be well on your way to dead by then anyway.)
And the proof is in society. So far,there really aren't any problems.
Aside from insane and/or stupid people placing living things (babies, dogs, etc.) in their microwave.
PS: This is also why the 2.4GHz band is unlicensed. Too many things in the environment absorb or otherwise interfere with the signal(s).
Sorry for asking but how exactly would I hook up something that amplified the signal of these devices to make it work over a mile or so?
See the situation is like this, I can get ADSL (I'm right at the service edge) But my cousin who lives about a mile or so down the street can't get it. If we could hook him up under my ADSL it would be a great solution especially if I could do it under linux. He's been begging me to find some solution to his problem. So I'm intrested in the cost of the equipment and how the setup would actually work. (The hardware end, I have a few spare IPs).
nothing against wavelan, but the Webgear Aviator also has fully gpl'd
drivers, and you can pick these up at almost any computer store(compusa,
frys, buy.com) for under $200. I got these going in my house, one in my
router box and one in my laptop, and i routine pull 120k-200k a sec from
across my house. Also, the webgear *include* the isa-to-pcmcia bridge
cards, unlike the wavelans. overall, these have been extremely stable
cards, with solid working drivers under linux and windows, and full
compatbility between the two, which is nice.
It is far better, and simpler, to just plug the cable modem into the UPLINK port on the router, using a standard ethernet cable. Why Bother,Chairman Crosslink Cable Elimination Task Force.
"Futuaris nisi irrisus ridebis"
"Recta non toleranda futuaris nisi irrisus ridebis"
Speed is quite variable, ranging from about 40-120 KByte/sec when using scp; the laptop itself is a fairly slow machine.
I'm using a P166 Linux system with Mandrake 6.1 as the IPmasq box, with one el cheapo Tulip-based card for the cable modem, one el cheapo PCI NE2000 clone for the internal wired network, and the wireless card installed in it. Fortunately it doesn't have a sound card, as IRQs don't grow on trees. I hacked the pmfirewall package so that it would set up the proper ipchains rules when running with three NICs.
One downside is that it's necessary to recompile your PCMCIA services with the Raylink driver (the Aviator cards are relabeled Raylinks) - be sure you do not use -fexpensive-optimizations when recompiling, or the PCMCIA services will behave very strangely.
I've thought about switching to a 2.3 kernel (the driver's already integrated), but I'm loath to muck with it now that it works.
Does anyone know any pointers to the security surrounding the use of these cards? Specifically, if I use one of these setups can someone who happens to be w/in 1500 feet of me now snoop my communications? I know I could set up freeswan but I would like to know if I have to.
Curious?
- Mark
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Well, almost. I wish there were OpenBSD drivers for them.
Bandwidth in megabits/sec isn't the big deal for wireless; its connectivity, range and compatibility that counts.
I do wish devices with crypto didn't cost more (even silly 40 or 64 bit crypto prevents casual eavesdropping). It's not like putting it in the product costs the vendors anymore (I wouldn't be surprised if non crypto enabled cards have the crypto silicon on them; just disabled)
I'm curious if anybody has good webpages or LUG urls that have setup projects for long distance wireless networks...
A friend of mine, that lives just about 3.2 kilometers from my house, wants to setup a wireless network.. but is something like this feasible ? There are several buildings blocking the line-of-sight..
Also, with the use of a directional attanae and reflecter, for greater gain, can the output power on these wireless cards be increased, say to 10 watts, 20 watts, or would I need special hardware for that ?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
There's a few to start you off.
It's my understanding that you can a wired-to-wireless bridge, run a patch cable to it (connects to uplink port on a hub)
Unless it's a switched port that is. You don't want to be clogging the wireless link with garbage that doesn't actually need to go to the other building. Remember, you're on a shared medium to an extent so try to keep extraneous network traffic at a minimum. I'd suggest you use a router or even a PC/workstation as a router.
Here is a Low Cost Wireless How-To. It shows some modifications for increased range on the low power 2.4 GHz devices.
Does anyone know what the usable distance for these wireless cards would be operating under water? Are there any means of adding antenna to them? Thanks. Gury
It could... but note that the gateway probably does more than just link the wireless network to your ethernet. 802.11 networks can run in two modes: ad hoc and infrastructure. In ad hoc mode, each wireless node talks directly to the other wireless nodes. In infrastructure mode, all stations talk to the gateway, which relays the message to the other wireless nodes (or to the ethernet). The advantage of infrastructure mode is that the gateway acts as a repeater, increasing the range; instead of all nodes having to be within x meters of each other, they have to be within x meters of the gateway. You can have a couple of these gateways, increasing the range even more.
That said, for most people, setting up an existing box to be a bridge or router between the wireless and wired networks is gonna be cheaper than buying the gateway :) And that's not to say that you couldn't use a Linux box as an infrastructure mode gateway... probably just a matter of writing the software. (I'm not a Linux guy, so I have no idea whether the software already exists or not).
Works great! Using IPSec with WaveLAN is ideal too. I don't like strangers listening in on my network traffic.
BTW, I think most pcmcia (hate that acro) are isa. PCMCIA is little more than isa with a smaller connector.
Ryan
I'm thinking of buying some of these cards, to be able to put my server upstairs. There is one thick concrete wall in between then. Distance about 5 metres.
Before I buy and find that it doesn't work: does anyone have experience with this? Would it work?
Well,
... hmmm ... 2 1/2 years ago ?
... hmmm ... only two days salary, but a whole month lunch too.
>Also, in most cases, I think the Linux PC would be more expensive
You can get a (used) P133 with plenty of Ram and Big Disks for around 30$, that's saving 300$.
>You've got to set up and administer the box
The last time I administered my Linux-Route/Firewall/etc
No, that's not true. I changed my ISP 4 Month ago.
And while I was at it I upgraded the Kernel'n'Stuff.
Took me 20 Minutes (plus 3 hours unattended.)
btw:
The Lucent solution costs me:
250$ * 2 = 500$
The Aviator set costs:
200$ for two cards.
300$
Does anybody know a european distributor for the Aviator ?
ciao
Anti
ps:
Don't take this personal, I only wanted to say it.
On the other side of the screen it all looked so easy.
I think you don't even have to write any software to do this, you could just set the gateway as the default router with a very narrow netmask (255.255.255.255) Grtz, Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
There's some actual circuitry in the drive-like thing, but it may just be stuff to control starting and stopping the cards/power support stuff, so it very well could be close to ISA.
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
That's not going to put the wireless nodes into infrastructure mode.
> FRANCE, who assigned the 2.4ghz range to the military
...another gem from the people who invented the ordinateur. I supposed it means their military people can buy such stuff cheaper than their civvies.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
when my little Nokia digital cell phone rang under my 17 inch monitor, the screen shifted to the left just before the call
these wireless devices are not as potent as the mighty 600 milliwatt cell phone
600 mW average, approx 200 WATTS peak, ballpark-equal to 1/3 of a standard (600W) microwave oven. That's how they get to kick monitors around and generally engauss them. By the way, do you hang one of these babies near your gonads when you go out? Or let it ring while it's next to your head? Just a question, think nothing of it...
Makes the WaveLAN seem even less nocuous than you said, doesn't it? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The 600W of a standard microwave is emitted inside a Faraday cage (shield), and I'm note sure that the WaveLAN card puts out as much as 100mW continuously.
Given the amount of power than an Athlon sucks now (two fans and a block of Al that weighs more than some notebooks), by the time we get to 2GHz CPUs you'll be able to heat your coffee bimodally - both by fan-forced convection and microwave - if only we can convince case makers to put the appropriate dent in, and CPU-cooler makers to make hollow fans that suck air through the heatsink instead of blowing.
Perhaps we could patch RC5 for temperature control? You know, feedback from the CPU temperature sensors, that kind of thing, wouldn't be hard to figure out from the heatsink temperature drop that a cold cup of coffee had been put down on it, and play a kettle-whistle sound bite when the cup was up to the right temperature.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Linux has, at last count, six different was of encrypting IP traffic, not counting ssh, PGP and the like. Who cares what the card itself does?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Ok but how much performance do you lose when encrypting the link? Is it enough to drop you to a 1mb/s from the ideal 11mb/s?
Not unless you're using something like a 386SX... the cost (with FreeS/WAN) is in processor power within the nodes, not in bandwidth.
I would hope that the MCUs in the cards could (en|de)crypt fast enough to not slow the link either, using the card-based encryption.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No, but it will do almost the same namely use the 'base' as a repeater to connect the other nodes.
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/