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What To Do With Old 802.11b Equipment?
CyberSlugGump writes "I am trying to declutter, and I have come across my cheap, off-brand, consumer-grade 802.11b wireless routers, PCMCIA cards, and USB adapters. The routers would still be good as 4-port 100Mb switches, and the other devices have at least 32-bit Windows XP drivers available. However, lack of security beyond WEP and the age of the equipment makes me wonder if it is worth any time putting it to use."
However, I think the reply to is "trash them". I'm probably not using my imagination enough, so I'm eager to read to suggestions of others. I'm a tech dumpster-diver and even I had to up my standards regarding equipment. With computers, I won't take anything less than 1Ghz++ AMD XP or P-IV, preferably with DDR RAM, but I'm not all that picky since usually you have decide on the spot and can't just open the machine up first.
With networking gear, I don't bother with anything beyond 100Mbps in wired and 802.11g for wireless. It simply is not worth the hassle.
The only thing I really can think of, is use the hardware to make a wireless bridge if you have two locations to connect that are out of range (can-tenna, etc...) A 11Mbps directional link is better than no link at all. That said, considering the 802.11g prices, you can probably just do it with newer hardware that will use less power. 54Mbps gear is already to be found in dumpsters near you.... I'm not kidding.
The other option would be to re-use it for people you can help in the low-income bracket. An older P-III laptop with a 802.11b card and a 802.11b router/access point is better than no gear at all. Still, my experience says that most people -even those in the lower income bracket- don't want the old gear. The few times I did manage to give away refurbished older hardware was to a single-income mom, working as an analyst in the tech sector, so her income wasn't "low" by any stretch of imagination, for her daughters use. (It was a AMD Athlon XP 2800+, 1GB RAM running Ubuntu 8.10 back then... Haven't gotten any news since). The others were just computer enthousiasts (professional or hobbists) who wanted something to toy around with.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Simple
Just like any other crap, bundle it all up and put it on ebay. The alternative is landfill.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
Throw it away and don't feel bad about it. New Jersey isn't even at 10% capacity yet.
If it is not useful to yourself or anyone you know don't just throw it away, find a local electronic recycling depot. In some places that can be hard, but at least if you have a Best Buy near you they will take it.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I agree. Trash them, same as you trashed your {2|3|4}86 boxes and your {MSDOS|WIN31} floppy disks.
An alternative is to donate them to some non-profit organisation which sends them to third-world countries; imagine for example how a Haiti school could benefit from some wifi equipment (provided, of course, the NPO also gets a few computers for them!)
Strength, balance, courage and reason. If you know what's this about, contact me!
http://www.computeraid.org/ refurbishes and ships this stuff to africa and beyond!
When you don't want old computer equipment, you give it away on your local Freecycle. I thought everyone knew that.
NB: does not work with CRT monitors.
Set the WIFI broadcast name of the router to something like, "George Hamilton cheated on his SATs!" where "George Hamilton" = your boss's name. Take it to work, plug it in, and hide it under your desk or someone else's. Can be used for all kinds of passive-aggressive complaining at work.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Flash it with something like DD-WRT that will let you use better encryption and allow for mesh networking, then get together with your local community and help them setup a community based wireless mesh network from your donation and other locals who have extra tech lying around unused.
In Silicon Valley, you take stuff like that to Weird Stuff Warehouse, which handles both surplus and electronics recycling. They're more into commercial gear, though; if you want previous-generation 1U servers, they have plenty.
Don't throw it out. Make a secondary network for music streaming. Compatibility permitting, put OpenWRT onto the router(s). Make a WAP for your car. Portable WAP via a small power supply. Practice cracking WEP keys. Annoy people by leaving it unsecured, but not connected to the Internet. Give it to someone who needs it. Turn off the wireless and create a protected subnet on your network. Make it make you toast. Set it up and yell at it when you get angry. Routers are tough, they can take it.
If you happen to be in Portland, Freegeek does good things with your old stuff.
Actually 802.11b has WPA support albeit only with TKIP ecncryption. It worked for me on linux prism hostap drivers after I updated card's firmware. So maybe you could use it, you don't need much bandwith if you just browse and SSH from your wireless devices. :)
Reduce -- too late, you presumably already have replacements
Reuse -- Freecycle etc, charities,
Recycle -- last option.
WPA was designed as an intermediate standard which would function on WEP-only hardware. That's why WPA uses TKIP instead of AES (which is what WPA2 uses). The devices may require firmware updates (which, of course, may not exist or may no longer be available) but the hardware itself is capable of WPA.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
you can usually turn off the wireless on most wireless routers and just use it as a regular old wired router, if it comes to that. but other than that, im sure you can donate it to the goodwill. I love goodwill. I got me a Samsung HT-XQ100 with digital optical in and a center speaker bar for $13 the other day and it works great for decoding digital audio from my WDTV box.. the only thing that didn't work was the DVD player doesn't load CD's or DVD's.. oh well, already got a DVD player anyways.. also got a famiclone for $1.50, whee... I don't need an 802.11b router, but there must be someone out there who could either use one of might enjoy hacking one to death.
Donate to ACCRC. A recycling shop run by Linux geeks.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Trash it (well, recycle it anyhow). Nobody wants the junk. Seriously.
The idea that some third world country is grateful to get insecure, unstable, junk computer equipment...well, that's offensive. Rather than shipping your toxic (literally) junk halfway around the world, if you want to support computers in third world countries (hint: more than 802.11b access points, they need things like water and sewage), simply donate MONEY to an organization that is involved in these things. If education and improving the world is your goal, I'd recommend Unicef.
Also, 802.11b uses radio, which means it needs to comply with whatever country's laws you send it to. US channels are not necessarily the third world's channels, and it's best to actually work with the government rather than assuming "They should be grateful weather or not is compatible with their usage of radio spectrum - Look at me, the rich person, doing nothing about their hunger, but giving them my trash I'm too cheap to recycle!"
I've worked for non-profits, the other suggestion here. We had lots of people offer us worthless junk for tax write-off purposes. Apparently our mission was not important enough to have reliable computer equipment (we only fed the hungry, so we apparently, unlike business, didn't need a computer with things like a warranty). Anytime you have "free" equipment, if you don't have a plan in place to replace/repair it when it breaks, it's not worth having - because you will end up depending on the equipment, which will be a disaster when it fails (and you have no money to fix it).
At some point, the hassle of working with old junk and making it work, putting up with how slow it is, dealing with failing electronics, and so forth isn't worth it.
I have 17 Pentium 3 class systems in my basement in a render farm. Sure, it's neat to have so many systems. But for my purpose, a single $300 quad core box literally has more compute power, more memory, more memory bandwidth, and uses way less electricity. Plus you don't have to maintain a billion systems. And it takes up less space. And there's no heat problem. I haven't replaced the pile yet, because I'm not doing that much 3D lately, but I will, and it will be awesome to be rid of so much clutter. I also have a bunch of Sun boxes. They were fun to get working, but they use too much power, and it's an absolute hassle to fiddle with them, maintain software on several platforms, and so forth. My free time is valuable; I don't want to waste it doing menial maintenence on crappy hardware.
Off brand low end consumer gear is barely designed to last 3 years, let alone past life expectancy. Most of that 802.11b gear is pretty limited in what it can do, and barely worked when it was new. It's not like you can install dd-wrt and turn them into a mesh.
Best case scenario is probably hooking up somebody who has no wireless and no resources up, like your local church or whatever. If it breaks, meh, they had low expectations to begin with. It may not even be worth doing that though, because a lot of older consumer routers break when subjected to the network behavior of newer versions of Windows because they can't handle scaling window sizes with the default settings, and it's a support chore to dink around with the settings on every machine that comes along in a non-enterprise environment.
Bottom line is that old junk starts costing you more to use than buying new stuff would.
You could use one of the old wireless routers to provide free & anonymous Internet access to others by routing all the traffic through TOR.
1. Disable any encryption & access restriction like MAC filters
2. Plug it into a separate ethernet port of a server / machine that's running 24/7
3. Route all the traffic through TOR
4. Throttle its traffic (QOS)
When your neighbor's Internet breaks down some day, they will be thankful for the free, albeit slow, Access Point of yours. Thanks to TOR, you don't have to fear any consequences for any mischief that's conducted over your AP.
Here's an example setup: https://www.agol.dk/elgaard/torap/.
n/t
The submitter doesn't know what to do with his 802.11b networking equipment, and says it's outdated? What the hell should I do, then, with my closet full of 802.11a adapters?
Seriously -- I got some Intel equipment for $5 a piece, originally $300+, and used it to build my first wireless network. It was a real Frankenstein's Monster of a setup, too: a dialup connection, a Coyote Linux box, and this crazy grey box that was so inefficient, it had a cooling fan built in. The thing didn't even have any sort of basic wired router/switch capability. It sat on top of the fridge for a couple of years... until we went to move it and saw that the warmth had turned it into a magnet for roaches. You've heard of a Roach Motel? This was a high-rise Roach Health Spa. That particular 802.11a adapter went straight into the burn bin (plastic and all).
Sadly, though, I still had three more units. At $5 each, I'd bought four.
To answer my own question, though, of what to do with them... I dropped them off before business hours at a local PC repair shop last week, along with a half-dozen old PCs that the kids were tired of tripping over. I hope they'll be able to put them to good use. After all, who's going to be able to eavesdrop on an 802.11a wireless connection?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
If you do that at my workplace, a couple of very serious men with badges, guns, and a laptop running Red Hat will momentarily be walking around your work area. They'll find it in short order. I'd rather not throw away my career, thank you.
Free Geek
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Take the stuff to Best Buy and they'll recycle it in a responsible manner. Landfilling it is unacceptable in this day and age.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
.. or do they borrow all your wi-fi bandwidth? Simpler than http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html you can run an old 802.11b system throttled down to 1 Mbit/sec on a crowded channel with a duplicate SSID.
Andrew Yeomans
I feel compelled to respond to this, even though it'll never receive the attention of the mods because the story is yesterday's.
I've spent a year working in a rural East African hospital, where I helped them rationalise their IT systems and build a site-wide IP phone network, among other things. One of the biggest problems we faced was well-meaning western donors sending old computers and IT hardware!
- If the only computers you can buy in an East African capital city have SATA connections, why would we want your old IDE drives?
- If the wireless networking gear we're using is all working at 802.11g, why would we want your old 802.11b gear?
- If we can't use the stuff, what do we do with it? Throw it into a hole in the ground, where the heavy metals in the components will leech into the water table? Burn it, polluting the local environment? At least in the US or Europe, it'll be disposed of sensibly.
I know it sounds like a good idea; I know it feels better than putting it in the trash. But often palming off your old gear onto a community in the developing world causes more problems than it solves.