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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.
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
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
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 >.
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!
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
Here's how to add a highly directional antenna to a wireless card with no antenna jack, specifically a zoomair card. I have three of them and did this to two of them. Line of sight goes for miles! :)
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.
Yes, this is one of the things that has been done right. The same frequency band is used across Europe, Japan, and the US -- 2.4Ghz. That's why equipment for the older 900 Mhz band is dying out.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
L0pht (@stake)'s wireless network.
Midcoast Wireless
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Considering your microwave oven is 1000 to 2000 watts and your wireless network card is a wimpy 100mW, good luck at getting it to heat a cup of coffee or your brain.
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?
---
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
Well. That's a tough one. Scientifically, how do you prove that something is harmless?
Here's a few facts though.
2.4Ghz is not ionizing radiation. It can't break down molecular bonds. (This is the chief cause of damage from higher-energy radiation, UV and up...)
2.4Ghz is the frequency (well.. 2.45) that most microwaves ovens run at. They don't mutate your food.. they just warm it up. (Really, that's all they do.. warm it up by vibrating polarized molecules.. chiefly water)
These network cards use in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 milliwats of power. Your cellphone probably uses about 10 times that. Your microwave only cooks things because it uses 6000 times that (600 watts)
If you turned your microwave on, with the door open (if you could) and stood there.. or if you just had a leak,the only thing that would happen is you would heat up. it wouldn't mutate your DNA, it would just increase your body temperature. Granted, if this happened rapidly, or in a focused area, it could be dangerous.... but that's all it does.
And the proof is in society. So far,there really aren't any problems.
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