Ask Slashdot: Wireless LAN Options?

fiji asks: "I am contemplating a wireless LAN for my house and was wondering if anyone had found a cheap, reliable, Linux solution. I have been looking at the Linux WLAN page and the ZoomAir cards but was a little put off because the price is $250 for the ISA and $230 for PCMCIA (at buy.com). Also the support matrix at the WLAN driver page shows the ISA as untested under Linux." Has anyone tested the ISA ZoomAir cards yet? What other driver options exist for Wireless LAN?

Comments

They work, sort of.

[CowboyNeal]

I've used several of the cards to set up a wireless masquerading firewall for a bunch of laptops. I've actually found the linux support to be better than the Win9x support for these cards, but they have problems with nfs mounts, and sometimes will break an ssh connection. Also, I've run into problems using the cards with a 2.2 kernel, so I'd recommend using 2.0.37 if you use these cards.

A few more resources ...

[Stan Chesnutt]

Give these folks a dose of the Slashdot Effect ...

radiolan

AiroNet

ShareWAVE

Me, I still use POC (plain old copper)

Re:Cordless?

[Booker]

Hm, well, I wouldn't expect a phone to have an ethernet jack, but IBM does make a 900Mhz cordless phone with a standard phone jack built in, which means that you can do wireless modeming...

Well, at least they used to. The web page is blank now. :/

Re:Options other than Wireless NICs

[Black Perl]

Currently, the power line solutions are relatively slow (about 350Kbps). But they are cheap, $109 for 2 computers _and_ 1 stand-alone printer (after current $50 rebate). So if you can stand slower networking when your significant other turns on the hair dryer, they might work for you.

This Intelogis news release indicates that power-line networking may be getting faster (10Mbps) and more reliable. I wonder how they're doing that, spread spectrum perhaps? Also noteworthy: Intelogis software is open source.

Re:Help !

[m_vand]

Check out http://www.rage.net/wireless/wireless_howto.html

It sounds like you can set up a 384kbps link up to 25 mi away or 2Mbps up to 4 miles away with their setup. They spent $1300.

Contemplating wireless

[Kaa]

I also was contemplating a wireless LAN for my house a month ago. I decided against it because:

(1) Wireless LANs are expensive as hell

(2) Speed over wireless LANs sucks

(3) There are few standards and it's not a well-understood technology. There is high probability that you'll spend all that money and end up being locked into some proprietary suboptimal solution with limited upgradeability.

So I sighed, and spend a weekend draping cat5 cable all over my house (primarily outside over external walls). It isn't aesthetic, but for $80=Linksys hub + 3x$25=NIC cards + ~$40=patch cables I have a 100Mbs Ethernet that works very well. If anything goes wrong with it, there are zillions sources of information on how to deal with it. And there is a cable modem, hanging off it, as well {grin}.

So, my point is, think carefully whether you *really* need a wireless network.

Kaa

ZoomAIR ISA works

[mayoff]

I'm using the ZoomAIR-4000 (PCMCIA) on my Thinkpad 770Z and the ZoomAIR-4005 (ISA) on my server to send this reply, so it definitely works.

The ISA version is an ISA/PCMCIA adapter card with one PCMCIA slot, plus the PCMCIA card. So you have to install PCMCIA card services on your server. You need pcmcia-cs version 3.0.9 (or later I suppose) to use wlan driver 0.2.6.

As for price - the ZoomAIR is by far the cheapest IEEE 802.11 solution I've seen. It uses the Harris PRISM chipset, and several other vendors also use that chipset, so there should be good interoperability. I know there are cheaper wireless network cards out there, but they're not 802.11 and I think they only do 1 Mbps. And I don't know if there are Linux drivers.

One more note - I believe Harris is supposed to start shipping the PRISM II chipset in quantity this month, which is supposed to support longer range, lower power, and 11 Mbps (instead of 2 Mbps). So you might want to wait a month or two and see if Zoom releases a new version. I'm okay with 2 Mbps because it's still 16x faster than my ISDN line.

Drivers are at www.absoval.com .

Better Wireless Hardware

[cshotton]

It's odd, but there still seems to be a serious lack of good wireless ethernet hardware at affordable prices. I don't understand why there aren't more solutions to this problem given all the initiatives to free up frequencies for just this purpose and the availability of low-cost radios on a chip, etc. I gave up on shopping based on price and opted for the most functional solution.

After a lot of analysis, the BreezeNet series of devices bubbled to the top of the heap. They are NOT cheap, but they will plug into any ethernet NIC and provide totally transparent 1.5 mbit to 2.5 mbit connectivity between a wired LAN and wireless nodes, or between wireless stations only. Details are at http://www.breezecom.com/Products/brz nprd.htm.

Unfortunately, a 2 node set-up (for example) will cost well over $1000. The access points (wireless hubs if you will) are around $1000, but you only need one of them. The "stand-alone" stations for individual ethernet interfaces are about $400, if I recall correctly.

The stuff has fantastic range (well over 500 feet through walls between 2 buildings with little signal loss in my case), requires absolutely no configuration, and works with any 10baseT ethernet device. My only complaint is the expense. If someone made similar hardware at a $200/node price point, they'd own this market.

FWIW, I have no connection with BreezeCom other than as a satisfied user of the BreezeNet hardware.