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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.
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
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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
L0pht (@stake)'s wireless network.
Midcoast Wireless
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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
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."
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
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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
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$427 for the minimum setup..
Ack. Don't you hate it when post-IPO dot-com-ers decide for you what's "cheap?"
---
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 .
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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
Dork! Spare us the sarcasm and use your head when you read peoples' posts.
He's not asking if his linux box cabn magically pickup radio waves, he's asking whether he can install a $179 card in his router and a $179 card in his (say) laptop, and have the two talk together, or whether he *needs* the seperate, external $350 (>> $179) residential gateway which has (DHCP, NAT, Ethernet) nothing his router can't do already!
A partial answer: the hardware can do it (I know a guy who works on them) but I dunno whether the GPL drivers can. (But if i had to bet I would guess they do...)
Well, I can deny it, based on the fact that Bluetooth has dick-all to do with 802.11 and wireless networking.
Bluetooth *IS* slow, and *IS* short range, and that won't change; it's not supposed to and doesn't need to.
And Lucent isn't having any problem maintaining market share. Those 11Mbps cards WAIL!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This is by no means a scientific measurement of RF power, but last night when my little Nokia digital cell phone rang under my 17 inch monitor, the screen shifted to the left just before the call. It takes power to mess up a monitor. The 5 watt UHF Motorola radios at work will move the picture on the computer monitors half way to the left. Back in my teenage years, I remember a 150 PEP mobile 11 meter linear amplifier that would invade all televisions and telephones on a block. (I would strongly discurage the use of said amplifier for reasons other than safety.)
Taking my directional antenna and feeding the full power of a flood ping to the heart of my monitor does . . . nothing. So, my guess is that these wireless devices are not as potent as the mighty 600 milliwatt cell phone.
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
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.
Physically, yes. However, that's not all it does. There's good bit of processing inside there. For the simple case of two machines, an "ad-hoc" network is perfectly ok -- both cards talk directly to each other.
In an "infrastructure" network, all the cards talk to an access point. This has the net effect of doubling the range between mobile units. As a mobile unit moves around, it can switch from one AP to another -- which ever one has the best signal, just like a cell phone. With enough access points placed throughout a building, one can move freely about the complex and never lose connectivity.
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.
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)
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.
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