Slashdot Mirror
Cheap Wireless 802.11b Bridging
eggboard writes "You can bridge two wired networks using two cheap Linksys 802.11b access points. This isn't exactly new, but the article I wrote, which just went up on Friday, describes in excruciating detail how to configure the units. The big news is really price: the WAP11 described is about $185 with a manfacturer's rebate. Using higher-gain antennas than the ones shipped with the WAP11 and/or tuning line-of-sight access, you've either figured out how to hook up a neighborhood of separate wired networks, or how to link multiple offices cheaply."
The WAP11 comes with a USB connection for configuration using a Windows-only application.
Is an official Linux version planned? Or will it be left to the OSS community to write one for themselves?
Apart from that, sounds cool.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
So how feasible would it be to blanket a city, say the size of Chicago, with wireless Internet, a la Metricom, only using 802.11b? Is it possible? Can you do it with a handful of hubs and some major antennas? (How about wiring the Sears Tower, eh? Hehe.)
I've seen the site that plans to do it on a user-informal level... But would this be a feasible business or non-profit venture? (Say UofC and UIatC in Chicago, or AUofP and UofPatS in Paris...?)
Sorry for my lack of knowledge on the issue. I just make sure my WiFi station and cards are working and go on...
Thanks for any answers.
jrbd
if you are lucky enough to have an antenna within your computer you could very well set it up as a wireless hub.
;).
I set up a wireless network consisting of 1 Win2k Athlon, a Dual g4 X tower, and an X TiBook for arround $350.
It's been working fine (as long as the 'puter with the software router doesn't go down). I saved about 300 bucks
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
It would be great to see these wireless
nodes forwarding packets via each other,
from node to node, not just from node to
net. Let's say your and my net connections
went down for an hour. In the meantime, my
packets could hop from my node, to yours,
to someone else's, and so on until they
reached a node that had connectivity. By
effectively combining several ISPs,
reliability and bandwidth would be boosted.
We'd still need ISPs, but we'd need them a
lot less, so they might be inclined to offer
better prices and products.
Why must people keep coming out with things that make me feel like I wasted the ~$600 I spent building a wireless to wired router/bridge out of one of these (the 1030N if you are wondering). Granted I could have saved some money if I had be brave enough to try to use a DiskOnChip instead of buying a 2.5" HDD...
Oh well, when I built it I still think it was cheaper than any of the other available solutions. Except of course for the P-133 box it replaced...but I wanted something that would sit on a shelf in the garage very unobtrusively.
BTW: here is the box sans hard drive.
------
Where are the slash-groupies? I distinctly remember being promised slash-groupies!
"Using higher-gain antennas than the ones shipped with the WAP11 ..."
That's a nice feature, but it is not mentioned in the article.
Who knows more about this ?
It seems the british government has decided that it is illegal for people to share their internet connection with their neighbours via wireless. This is purely to protect the business of corporate broadband wireless providers. Did somebody say government sponsored monopoly?
Careful though.
a) By modifying equipment you may be breaking FCC rules (USA) or your local rules.
Additionally, in the UK, 802.11b is NOT apprived for commercial use. I spoke at length with the UK government Radio Agency last week to establish this (my company use 802.11b to connect remote advertising screens, but not in the UK where this is forbidden.)
Michael
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
Additionally, in the UK, 802.11b is NOT apprived for commercial use
The same is valid for Austria and Germany. I hope that worldwide standards will soon be developed so that we can avoid this "inconvenience"
".Sig Stealer" was here
Anybody knows a wireless USB device working with :-(
Linux ? I couldn't find any
802.11b IS approved in Germany and Austria, i just read this here
".Sig Stealer" was here
hmmmmmmm.... a heart?? Can somebody help me out here!
--
buy this, damnit all to hell
I can't wait to see this done using 802.11a devices (when they arrive). :)
:)
Last mile problem? No problem at all!
[For those who don't know, 802.11a is just like 802.11b, except at over 50 megabits per second.]
Unfortunately, like other 802.11b solutions, these use WEP, which is inherently broken... if I were linking my business' two campuses, I wouldn't really want Joe, Bob and Mary (who all happen to have line of sight) sniffing all of my network traffic with their perfectly simple store-bought solutions. :-)
meisenst
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
Is it just me or is this article completely lacking in any technical details at all. Basically there's nothing noted there that isn't in the users manual. It's even lacking much of what's in the manual. And it mentions a better antenna you can connect to the WAP11, but does it mention any details about the antenna? No. I've been looking at the antenna's on the market and I've found the HyperGain HG2410U 10dB Omnidirectional Antenna, however I still cant figure out which of the like 10 different connectors will go into the back of the WAP11.
I tried looking to see if there's some way to use a second wireless access point as basically a repeater (so I could extend my wireless network throughout the house). I was hoping for something that'd just look at the packets coming in and send them out to and from the previous access point.
Even called Cisco and they said this couldn't be done. Anyone know differently?
"Brown University? We have one of those in Providence!" -- Outside Providence
Well, yeah, you could put a bunch of beam antennas on the Sears Tower and cover the area with a pattern like pie slices (although you'd also need a few pointing down for better coverage near the Tower). But your clients might also need beam antennas, and a single 802.11b transceiver can't handle more than several dozen clients -- well, maybe a couple hundred with the right activity pattern.
Yes, indeed, this would be excellent to have, however it requires the use of a routing algorithm to determine where to send packets. I'm sure the Linksys folks are working on this right now.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
My best friend lives about 10 miles away (not line of sight :( ) and he has a DSL connection. My parents live approx. between us. I need something wireless that would allow me to use his DSL line and we could use my parents house as a repeater.
:)
So, does anyone know of any 5 mile, non line-of-sight, bridgeable, wireless solutions? Or am I asking too much?
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
The only real solution for the problem WEP tries to solve is to use end-to-end encryption, e.g. ssh or ssl.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
SeattleWireless and PersonalTelco are already doing it. Go read. :)
would be the key part of that statement.
- Toby
Why not turn bridging on in the kernel and bridge to an internally connected 802.11b card.
I used to work for (company unnamed, but you have heard of them) a place that developed a stand-alone product where the "bridged mode" is done exactly this way. (It was still in development when I left, and I don't believe it is yet on the market.) Bridging performance was about the same as other 802.11b access point devices.
While the platform was a bit differant (StongARM and mini-PCI cards) there is no reason you couldn't do the same with a P166 sitting in the closet, a card bus controller and a cheap 802.11 card.
This is already implemented over here in melbourne, australia.
the link: http://melbwireless.dyndns.org/
You're right - and it exists. Routing protocols that would make such things work exists for so-called MANETS (Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks), being developed by the IETF.
Working in this area myself, I'd like to point to
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/manet-charter
Now, for the shameless plug: A link to the OLSR routing protocol for MANET's, which is showing promising results. Implementations (downloadable, with sourcecode etc. of the routing deamon) are available (drop voop@cs.auc.dk an email if interrested in the code - the www-server is currently not responding).
-- "Life is a bitch - and she hates me..."
There's a story (very light on details) with some pictures of my node sitting 450 meters away from it's wireless uplink.
You'll notice the use of an empty cider can to mount the Lucent Range Extender on. This was actually vitally important. Between the two sites was a kebab shop (seriously) that was just breaking line of site, and with the various combinations of wireless kit, we were right at the end limits of getting a signal. We messed around for a few days trying various things, and, eventually, over a can of Strongbow I realised raising the antenna those 5 or 6 inches higher might work. And the rest is history.
That site has moved now, and is much closer to the primary site,so the feat is not nearly as impressive. But you geeks can, uh, geek out at knowing that the website below comes to you [spooky voice]through the air[/spooky voice].
...j
I've just used the Linksys firmware to upgrade
my netgear me102 access point and used the Linksys
SMNP utility to configure it.
In fact I think it should work on any PRISIM chip
based 802.11b access point.
One thing I noticed though. After upgrading the firmware I had to unplug the ME102 and plug it back in brfore I could access it again.
Why not turn bridging on in the kernel and bridge to an internally connected 802.11b card.
Because I bought Orinoco Wavelan cards and the bridging firmware is sent to the card by the access point at every boot up. :-(
Mind you, I've got a logic analyzer with enough lines to handle a 16-bit PCMCIA bus, I just have to beg/borrow/steal an access point and spend the next few weeks untangling the init code to see what they send so I can tell Linux to do the same. :-)
Are all cards that use the same chipset as the WaveLan cards (Hermes 2 I think?) incapable of bridging without the firmware? If not, I'll just buy a cheap one and use it instead, or see if I can't do a dump of the firmware and muck with sending it to the Wavelan. :-)
That's fine and dandy to raise the gain on the bridge or router or whatever but the gain on the client side will also have to be raised or you won't see any increase in distance in your wireless networks.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
It is hardly theisable to setup a wireless network with lynksys with wireless internet. It is however entire possible to do this with other manufactures gear. For example in Minnesota MANY cities have a partial deployment of wireless internet, and a few have FULL deploymen, the city of mankato (the home of MSU mankato state university) has 100% of its city wired. In Minnesota, you can drive from Midstate, to northern iowa without ever getting off the internet. ericc@xtratyme.com
But higher-gain antennas are illegal modifications to that sort of device. The rationale is if 12 of you in the same apartment decide to wireless wan yourselves to 12 separate friends across the street with you high-gain antennas or amplifiers, at least one pair of you, and possibly more, will experience service degredation. Just like the CB syndrome, where people using legal equipment got stomped on by the many using illegally modified equipment. It gotten to the point where the FCC only brings enforcement against CB ops in cases of interference to other services, and even then only against stationary operators, 'cause you can't bust everybody with 18 wheels, a brick and a firestick.
AC's cheerfully ignored
No Text.
This method has the advantage of being cheap mainly. Where you want more security and performance give this a try:
I have used a Linux box as my wireless AP for
some while with good success. I just tossed
in a Lucent ISA adapater and an Orinoco card
into an otherwise ordinary Linux router. I did
add DHCP and squid with transparent proxying but that's just gravy. Works great, my laptop users would never have any idea they aren't using a "real" access point.
I can't see any reason with a tiny bit of work this couldn't be extended to routing functions for multi-building WAN connection. Next you can just turn OFF the WEP stuff and set up a PPP and ssh tunnel on the wireless interface. Set up the routes and let the PPP/ssh tunnel handle the WAN traffic. That way you have some decent security instead of the flawed WEP stuff.
Exactly what is line of site? If I wanted to use this method to bridge two wireless networks together would I acctually have to be able to see both antenna's when I stood by the other, meaning no tree's or anything could be obstructing the view?
http://www.nu-vision.org
If I wanted to end up providing tech support to my neighbors. I can think of no less effective use of my time.
The WAP11 can also be configured via its Ethernet port with SNMP. See ftp://ftp.linksys.com/pdf/wap11ug.pdf :
Their Wireless Cale/DSL routers offer web-based configuration, although more pricey and overkill for this sort of project.
I've been looking into putting wireless between my friends apartment and mine. We live in the same apartment complex and are about a half mile away. But in between us is several walls and a bunch of trees. Is there a high gain antenna I could slap on one of these puppies that would burn through something like that?
----------------- Who is Jesus?
This isn't exactly new, but the article I wrote, which just went up on Friday...
and it went down at:
Posted by Hemos on Monday August 27, @03:38AM
Sure fancy boy you can do all that reading and writing but can you do mirroring?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
If you can build a Linux box and stick a generic wireless card in it for less than $185 (the Linksys including rebate) and a couple hours of your time, then it's certainly a good idea. I know that BAWUG (www.bawug.org) is working on a platform reference for a 486-based, low-power system that would be a Web server, access point, authentication server, and lots else.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
You could also use Windows XP to do this with two wireless cards in Ad-Hoc mode (dont really need an AP in a small office/home/apt.) as XP will bridge the wired/wireless networks together.
Couldn't do it for $200 if all the parts were new. (At least using common PC hardware. You could build an embedded device in volume for that, but that's not my point.) Most IT folks that I know have lots of old hardware hanging out with nothing to do.
Couple of hours. Not the for the first time, at least it wasn't for me the first time I did something similar. Certainly, there is a learning curve. However, once complete, it would take very little time to duplicate this effort. Factor the time over multiple units, and this is no longer an issue.
Sure you can spend $185 for a solution that works almost out of the box, but it's more fun to MacGyver something together using obsolete equipment around you and a minimal amount of cash.
The Linksys PC Card is terrible. Ten unobstructed feet from my WAP (a Linksys WAP 11, which I'm quite happy with) and the signal strength was barely 50%. Completely unusable 30 feet away thru a wall. Switching to an Orinoco Silver cured these problems. And I'm not the only one who had this difficulty; others on the alt.internet.wireless newsgroup report the same poor reception problem.
would be a wireless access point with a built in switch. Do these things exist for a cheap price?
The problem is that if my cable modem is on the opposite side of the house where my lan is, then I'd have to buy wireless cards for all my pc's. Or I'd have to buy at least one card and use a computer as a router. bleh.
I'd rather have an access point with a built in switch/hub that would allow me to cascade it into a remote lan/switch. If these things do exist, are they cheap?
Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to just use two 802.11 interfaces in a Linux box for a wireless bridge? Couldn't that also replace a typical access point if you used one 10BaseT and one 802.11 NIC?
xset up to boxes with your favorite os, pop in a wired and wireless nic in each, put the wired ends on there own networks (192.168.1.xxx and 192.168.2.xxx) and use a diffeent set for the wirelesss portion (10.15.3.xxx). set up each box to route, and run the wireless segment using encrypion L2tp comes to mind..
:)
and enjoy.
not the cheapest, but secure none the less, and you can allways stick a crisco logo on em
see above
Geeks beware: as of this writing the Linux drivers for the Linksys WPC11 are IMHO unusable for setting up a simple home firewall/router. This is the cheapest Linksys 802.11b card out and it's the only one that Fry's carries. The WPC11 requires an experimental Linux kernel plus patches plus editing some constants at the beginning of a header file and recompiling a driver to get them to work. Apparently the WPC11 is basically just a glue card that makes the PCMCIA core visible on the PCI bus. See here for more info on getting the Prism chipset working with Linux and problems with the WPC11. If you want to build a working router with the WPC11 in less than a day with a spare PC, you'll have to swallow your open-source pride and install a copy of Windows 98 and WinProxy. I did so last week and got it working in less than an hour.
Using an access point means that you have a cheap computer than you can put almost anywhere and will (hopefully) just work. You can put it in the attic, just under the antenna. You can, theoretically, put it under the eaves of the roof (though they are usually not designed for outdoor use, so be careful).
Apparently, of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.