Last summer I expanded my consulting business. Previously, I'd only handled small businesses. Then I advertised to fix home computers. The same afternoon that Yellow Pages advert hit my doorstep, I started getting calls and it hasn't stopped. 95% of it is spyware screwing up the Internet connection and slowing down the system. If there's someone under 25 in the house, it's nearly a certainty the computer is hosed-up with spyware. And no, porn is not always involved. There is nothing I can do to solve the spyware problem for many of these people. I can't pin-point how they got it. Sometimes you get a time and date but that's just a footprint. I can clean their system for $80-$100 but that only gets them back to square one and they will cheerfully run to step two, three and four. Microsoft AntiSpyware isn't sufficient. To clean many systems, it requires expert use of Hijack This, and I'll run AdAware and Spybot just to be sure. If I didn't run them all, I can't tell you how many times I've had to repeat the cleaning. Some of it is quite good at regeneration, and when they're starting-up in the registry with vague names that purposefully resemble Windows components or printer drivers, it's a hassle to Google them all. I can look the teen in the eye and tell them not to run KaZaA and Morpheus and to stop installing software, but they keep doing it, especially if Mom doesn't make them pay the repair bill. No one wants to run as non-admin. Even if they buy some $30 anti-spyware tool, it still pops-up and asks them to block or not. They are not often capable of answering correctly. And heaven forbid they try to fix it themselves - damn these system restore checkpoints to hell! All they do is screw up the system. If Microsoft can't adequately tell me what it's doing, I don't want it in the operating system. And what about the customers who are unhappy with your work because they're rapidly re-infected? Customers aren't logical and adept at computers. That's why they are customers and not computer experts. If it weren't for customer data being spread all over the computer, and the inane time-consuming complexity of reinstalling all their apps and drivers, I'd recommend a reformat in a heartbeat. But these days, many systems like Compaq don't even come with restore CDs - you have to take the time to burn five or six yourself sometime after you buy the system and before your HD dies.
Urban and suburban areas already have increasingly cheap, increasingly fast DSL and cable modem connections. Wireless of any form costs more, has more parts to break, and suffers interference that DSL and cable don't see as often. For rural areas, the city center is probably covered by DSL and cable. You can't beat BigCable and BabyBell on price with wireless: how do you amortize at least $400 in customer-premise equipment at $30-40 a month, not counting the cost of bandwidth? Who warranties it when lightning strikes? And bandwidth isn't cheap in the sticks, either. I just got done with a 3 year T-1 contract that cost $768 plus tax, and the renewal is still at $532. How many people do you want to over-subscribe on that, especially when more and more of them want to run their p2p apps full-bore, all day long? How much time do you want to spend trying to out-filter the next p2p app? It almost makes me think I should get into the business of dial-up. A modem is a great rate limiter. A previous poster mentioned the Kuro5hin article from last December. There's plenty of wisdom in it. Go read it. And I say all this as one of those mom-and-pop small-town WISPs.
Recently a client told me that his free Yahoo mail account's email archive completely disappeared. He tried yelling emails into the black hole of human-free tech support but got nowhere of course. This isn't the first time this had happened, he said. So in this guy's case, I'd say it's remarkable that the family found someone to talk to about the emails or lack thereof.
Because changing the channel for an access point for a WISP will affect all the customers. Sure, it's possible to change channels on all customer premise equiment, then change the AP and hope it all comes back up, but I don't like those sorts of days. If it fails, it means customer visits.
When SBC rolled out DSL in my little town, they offered a rebate or a "free" wireless AP / firewall. 2Wire's press release at the time pointed out that these says these home APs are up to 400 mW each, and that one of their exclusive distributors was SBC. These were the 2Wire HomePortal HW1000, a 400 mW firewall / access point / DSL modem. It's SBC's right to sell DSL, of course, and WiFi is an unlicensed, contentious spectrum, but now their choice of AP has blanketed neighborhoods with excessive 2.4 Ghz noise. These home APs were lighting up the neighborhood with more power than any CPE or APs of the WISPs in town (like me.) A year ago, a new tenant moved into a building two doors down from my office. He was having other computer troubles, so I helped him out. He has SBC DSL. I asked him if he took them up on their "get a free wireless AP" sign-up offer; he said "no". In fact, because they'd sent the wrong equipment the first time, he'd talked to customer support at least once to get a new modem, and they'd asked him if he wanted wireless and again he said "no". He's a mortgage company so he wanted to avoid wireless for security reasons. A few days before, I had started having trouble with a wireless network in my office. A walk around the block with MiniStumbler found a strong WEP'd "2WIRE734" source on channel 6 outside his office. Later in the day his office was open. Sure enough, inside, MiniStumbler says SNR 83, -28. I jump into the web interface of the modem and dig around until I find the wireless interface's "disable" button. It was also quite convenient that SBC preconfigured it with a password composed of his office's street address, minus the spaces. It's a good thing there's a disable button. He explicitly didn't want wireless, yet they shipped it to him and he didn't know he had wireless turned on. It made for a crappy day of debugging for me, as it swamped my lower-power 100 mW APs and CPEs. Earlier, these 2Wire devices wreaked havoc with a Cisco AP-352. It was incapacitated by deauthentication messages: the log showed "2004/01/19 09:37:10 (Info): Deauthentication from 00:d0:9e:f8:8f:b1, reason "Not Associated", many times per second. The wired side is flooded with LLC packets from the AP with a destination of 01:40:96:ff:ff:00. The AP is dropping 30% of ping packets sent to it. That mystery MAC isn't any of mine. Sniffing around the neighborhood, I find the mystery MAC. Lookup says it's a 2Wire device. Sure enough, I find not one but four APs in the neighborhood "2WIRE268" "2WIRE837" "2WIRE870" "2WIRE877", all on default channel 6, where none were a few months ago. I never solved the problem. I had to turn off the logging to avoid the trouble. I described it on the BAWUG list, and to their credit, a 2Wire developer contacted me to attempt to debug it. No solution.
Gee, you're welcome, Slappy. I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to see my own advert. I, too, hate going to movies. First of all, I hate most movies because they suck. I miss the Filthy Critic. For he was wise. However, even he was addicted to movies in the same way I'm addicted to caffeine. I too resent the high cost of taking me and the kids to the theater, but that's partially because I'm frugal. I'd rather spend money and time on something worthwhile. I can avoid movies that are utterly and consistently lame by not going to movie theaters. They'll all be on DVD in N months, where N is getting smaller all the time. Then I can get them for free at the library, or I can pay a very few bucks to rent them and watch them at home. "National Treasure"? Nick sleepwalks through it. Plot holes a mile wide. Utter foolish fantasy, draped in reality, and not very exciting. Stereotypical characters and plots in the extreme. Made a zillion bucks. Go figure. If I'm so smart, how come I ain't rich? Or maybe I am.
And I think it's worth it. It'll run for six months at the local multiplex. It will be shown something like 8,000 times before something like 100,000 visitors. You can view it at http://www.gojefferson.com/goJefferson.wmv. I don't know if the theater gets a cut, frankly. Wouldn't surprise me if they did. I'm sure the salesperson does. The ad-selling company http://www.uniquescreenmedia.com/about.html provides and maintains the projectors for the theater. Apart from the ad itself, they give me the services of a graphic designer (working in After Effects) and their voice-over talent. I wrote the script, the designer did it in an afternoon. I don't think it's expensive. It'll hit my target audience: families with teens with spyware-infected PCs who want someone local to fix it for them. They'll pay ~$100 for me to do so. There must be a business opportunity here for Internet-fed solutions. If ads were fed via the net, ads could be targeted and sold much more flexibly than this six-month DVD method. You could put a Wifi access points and ad kiosks in each theater, too.
Whoops, hit Submit accidentally. There's so many spectrums of spyware these days. How many Windows apps, free or not, phone home after installation or at every run? Uhm, yeah, they're only "checking for updates". Even some Windows device drivers (like some printer drivers) phone home. You don't know what any of these programs are sending, or how often they send it.
OK, I'll bite: Why is Viewpoint Media Player, which ships from Microsoft with Windows, considered spyware? Googling found this: http://www.spywareguide.com/product_show.php?id=88 0 When it delivers a 3D ad, it phones home with the details of whether you responded. But how many sites use their content?
I'll second the rinse-lather-repeat effectiveness of Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D, but also that Hijack This is necessary to zap some spyware. The hard part, and I mean really hard, is looking through its listings of all the potential spots where Windows will automatically run an executable. The spyware program filenames are as confusing as possible, leading even a geek to believe they are part of Windows. Or part of the OEM install, or part of something from a printer or a camera or a USB device. The only answer is Google, then removing items carefully. Do you cut the red wire or the blue wire? Another big problem I face in my consultancy / repair work is that there's no effective tool I've found yet that can clean a drive if the system isn't running. The removers all want to be installed on live systems. Sometimes these spyware'd systems are so slow as to be unbootable or unusable, or the net stack is hosed. Then what? I'd pay for a Knoppix-based cleaner.
Check out http://www.threedee.com/jcm/ for more history of the Terak computer and the p-System. A pure bitmap display with 320 x 240 mono graphics, pan/scroll, a software-driven speaker and sound, all designed as a desktop personal computer, wow! It's right there in the history books next to Xerox PARC machines and the PERQ.
In November 1981, an Terak 8510/a with a PDP-11/03 CPU, 56K of RAM and one floppy drive was $8,935. And extra floppy drive was $2,570. You could even upgrade to color graphics at 640 x 480 by eight colors for $10,550. A ten meg hard drive was $7,985.
One of my functional Teraks was invited to take part in the 1970s History exhibit at SIGGRAPH 98, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference, the annual gathering of the computer graphics industry.
The p-System was one of the operating system alternatives for the original IBM PC, apart from MS-DOS and CP/M-86. If you can find them, the disk images for that p-System will still run in a command window under Windows, if you preload ANSI.SYS.
I've modified these before. Yes, HR goes nuts because "no one's ever tried to change it before, everyone just signs them." Instead of giving away everything you do, just change it to say you'll agree to give them any ideas or inventions related to what it is you're hired to do. It's easy to defend that if HR and their lawyers ask you about it. And no, I don't think you need to hire a lawyer.
Let them rewrite the agreement the way that satisfies them. If they think it's OK to scratch it out and write in the margins, so be it. If they want a new draft, tell them to change it. I don't believe that any company really wants to fire you that early in the game. It's very expensive to find and hire people. They've already wasted thousands on you. They'll bend.
I, too, wonder just how compatible the WET11 will be, and whether it is actually a good low-cost CPE.
(I haven't played with a WET11 yet. I realize WET11 and WAP11 v1.1, 2.x are different products by different companies. I realize your O'Reilly review didn't suggest it would be good CPE, but others are suggesting that.)
I'd hoped you would compare and contrast with the WAP11 "access point client" mode. I think APC mode showed that handling multiple MACs from a single end-point would seem to be a function of the AP, not the remote equipment. For example, using WAP11 APC mode with a Cisco AP-352 would let you ping the WAP11, but nothing behind. I cloned the MAC with a Linksys BEFSR41 NAT router/fw, and presto, it would pass all traffic. Then I tried connecting a second WAP11/BEF pair to that Cisco AP, and the Cisco would reboot every time the second one associated! Cisco really doesn't want you to bridge this way. It seems deliberate, too - earlier Cisco/Aironet bridges don't do this. Do the WET11 docs explain exactly what it's doing?
Someone on a dslforum thread on WET11 at http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,3915738 ~roo t=dslalt~mode=flat said it only passes a single MAC to the remote network. Isn't that bending the definition of "bridge"? If true, won't this cause trouble in some environments?
I'm so tired of companies bending definitions, stretching standards, and inventing terminology, followed by weeks and months of the user community discovering these errors and miscommunications through failure and tech support calls, when a few simple paragraphs in the docs in the most precise 7-layer and networking terminology would make it clear what a product does and doesn't do.
With the WET11, it does seem like companies are evolving towards what I agree would be a better CPE solution: something like a WET, but why not with an integrated NAT / firewall like the $80 Linksys boxes?
Better yet, combo with the VPN abilities of the BEFVP41 and BEFSX41. Hardware VPN encryption as needed, forget WEP, NAT/fw when you need it.
I've been using these at my WISP and it's working great so far: customers get VPN between remote sites (at full wireless speed when they stay on my network) plus NAT to protect their local network when on the Internet, and administratively, the VP41 and SX41 can use syslogd for logging.
Jim Kent was once known in the mid-80s for writing Zoetrope, a 2D path-based animation system for the Atari ST, not unlike today's Flash technology. Zoetrope also became Aegis Animator on the Amiga, and Autodesk's Animator Pro for the PC, which begat the.FLI/.FLC animation format. I believe Kent also worked on the first DOS generations of Autodesk's 3D Studio, too.
Slashdot Mirror
No, people like NAT boxes because their ISP only wants to give them one real IP address.
Pour into bowl, eat with big spoon. Problem solved. Works for greasy potato chips or Fritos, too.
Last summer I expanded my consulting business. Previously, I'd only handled small businesses. Then I advertised to fix home computers. The same afternoon that Yellow Pages advert hit my doorstep, I started getting calls and it hasn't stopped. 95% of it is spyware screwing up the Internet connection and slowing down the system.
If there's someone under 25 in the house, it's nearly a certainty the computer is hosed-up with spyware. And no, porn is not always involved. There is nothing I can do to solve the spyware problem for many of these people. I can't pin-point how they got it. Sometimes you get a time and date but that's just a footprint.
I can clean their system for $80-$100 but that only gets them back to square one and they will cheerfully run to step two, three and four. Microsoft AntiSpyware isn't sufficient. To clean many systems, it requires expert use of Hijack This, and I'll run AdAware and Spybot just to be sure. If I didn't run them all, I can't tell you how many times I've had to repeat the cleaning. Some of it is quite good at regeneration, and when they're starting-up in the registry with vague names that purposefully resemble Windows components or printer drivers, it's a hassle to Google them all.
I can look the teen in the eye and tell them not to run KaZaA and Morpheus and to stop installing software, but they keep doing it, especially if Mom doesn't make them pay the repair bill. No one wants to run as non-admin. Even if they buy some $30 anti-spyware tool, it still pops-up and asks them to block or not. They are not often capable of answering correctly. And heaven forbid they try to fix it themselves - damn these system restore checkpoints to hell! All they do is screw up the system. If Microsoft can't adequately tell me what it's doing, I don't want it in the operating system.
And what about the customers who are unhappy with your work because they're rapidly re-infected? Customers aren't logical and adept at computers. That's why they are customers and not computer experts.
If it weren't for customer data being spread all over the computer, and the inane time-consuming complexity of reinstalling all their apps and drivers, I'd recommend a reformat in a heartbeat. But these days, many systems like Compaq don't even come with restore CDs - you have to take the time to burn five or six yourself sometime after you buy the system and before your HD dies.
Urban and suburban areas already have increasingly cheap, increasingly fast DSL and cable modem connections. Wireless of any form costs more, has more parts to break, and suffers interference that DSL and cable don't see as often.
For rural areas, the city center is probably covered by DSL and cable. You can't beat BigCable and BabyBell on price with wireless: how do you amortize at least $400 in customer-premise equipment at $30-40 a month, not counting the cost of bandwidth? Who warranties it when lightning strikes?
And bandwidth isn't cheap in the sticks, either. I just got done with a 3 year T-1 contract that cost $768 plus tax, and the renewal is still at $532.
How many people do you want to over-subscribe on that, especially when more and more of them want to run their p2p apps full-bore, all day long? How much time do you want to spend trying to out-filter the next p2p app?
It almost makes me think I should get into the business of dial-up. A modem is a great rate limiter.
A previous poster mentioned the Kuro5hin article from last December. There's plenty of wisdom in it. Go read it. And I say all this as one of those mom-and-pop small-town WISPs.
What, this story has been up for an hour or more and no one's stalked the home page of the researcher and no one's mentioned that she's hot?y pics.html
https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/web/funn
Recently a client told me that his free Yahoo mail account's email archive completely disappeared. He tried yelling emails into the black hole of human-free tech support but got nowhere of course. This isn't the first time this had happened, he said. So in this guy's case, I'd say it's remarkable that the family found someone to talk to about the emails or lack thereof.
Because changing the channel for an access point for a WISP will affect all the customers. Sure, it's possible to change channels on all customer premise equiment, then change the AP and hope it all comes back up, but I don't like those sorts of days. If it fails, it means customer visits.
When SBC rolled out DSL in my little town, they offered a rebate or a "free" wireless AP / firewall. 2Wire's press release at the time pointed out that these says these home APs are up to 400 mW each, and that one of their exclusive distributors was SBC. These were the 2Wire HomePortal HW1000, a 400 mW firewall / access point / DSL modem.
It's SBC's right to sell DSL, of course, and WiFi is an unlicensed, contentious spectrum, but now their choice of AP has blanketed neighborhoods with excessive 2.4 Ghz noise. These home APs were lighting up the neighborhood with more power than any CPE or APs of the WISPs in town (like me.)
A year ago, a new tenant moved into a building two doors down from my office. He was having other computer troubles, so I helped him out. He has SBC DSL. I asked him if he took them up on their "get a free wireless AP" sign-up offer; he said "no". In fact, because they'd sent the wrong equipment the first time, he'd talked to customer support at least once to get a new modem, and they'd asked him if he wanted wireless and again he said "no". He's a mortgage company so he wanted to avoid wireless for security reasons.
A few days before, I had started having trouble with a wireless network in my office. A walk around the block with MiniStumbler found a strong WEP'd "2WIRE734" source on channel 6 outside his office. Later in the day his office was open. Sure enough, inside, MiniStumbler says SNR 83, -28. I jump into the web interface of the modem and dig around until I find the wireless interface's "disable" button. It was also quite convenient that SBC preconfigured it with a password composed of his office's street address, minus the spaces.
It's a good thing there's a disable button. He explicitly didn't want wireless, yet they shipped it to him and he didn't know he had wireless turned on. It made for a crappy day of debugging for me, as it swamped my lower-power 100 mW APs and CPEs.
Earlier, these 2Wire devices wreaked havoc with a Cisco AP-352. It was incapacitated by deauthentication messages: the log showed "2004/01/19 09:37:10 (Info): Deauthentication from 00:d0:9e:f8:8f:b1, reason "Not Associated", many times per second. The wired side is flooded with LLC packets from the AP with a destination of 01:40:96:ff:ff:00. The AP is dropping 30% of ping packets sent to it.
That mystery MAC isn't any of mine. Sniffing around the neighborhood, I find the mystery MAC. Lookup says it's a 2Wire device. Sure enough, I find not one but four APs in the neighborhood "2WIRE268" "2WIRE837" "2WIRE870" "2WIRE877", all on default channel 6, where none were a few months ago.
I never solved the problem. I had to turn off the logging to avoid the trouble. I described it on the BAWUG list, and to their credit, a 2Wire developer contacted me to attempt to debug it. No solution.
Don't know about the rest of the country, but here in the Midwest, you'll be warned of nearby police when someone flashes their high beams.
Gee, you're welcome, Slappy. I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to see my own advert.
I, too, hate going to movies. First of all, I hate most movies because they suck. I miss the Filthy Critic. For he was wise. However, even he was addicted to movies in the same way I'm addicted to caffeine. I too resent the high cost of taking me and the kids to the theater, but that's partially because I'm frugal. I'd rather spend money and time on something worthwhile.
I can avoid movies that are utterly and consistently lame by not going to movie theaters. They'll all be on DVD in N months, where N is getting smaller all the time. Then I can get them for free at the library, or I can pay a very few bucks to rent them and watch them at home.
"National Treasure"? Nick sleepwalks through it. Plot holes a mile wide. Utter foolish fantasy, draped in reality, and not very exciting. Stereotypical characters and plots in the extreme. Made a zillion bucks. Go figure. If I'm so smart, how come I ain't rich? Or maybe I am.
And I think it's worth it. It'll run for six months at the local multiplex. It will be shown something like 8,000 times before something like 100,000 visitors. You can view it at http://www.gojefferson.com/goJefferson.wmv .
I don't know if the theater gets a cut, frankly. Wouldn't surprise me if they did. I'm sure the salesperson does. The ad-selling company http://www.uniquescreenmedia.com/about.html provides and maintains the projectors for the theater. Apart from the ad itself, they give me the services of a graphic designer (working in After Effects) and their voice-over talent. I wrote the script, the designer did it in an afternoon.
I don't think it's expensive. It'll hit my target audience: families with teens with spyware-infected PCs who want someone local to fix it for them. They'll pay ~$100 for me to do so.
There must be a business opportunity here for Internet-fed solutions. If ads were fed via the net, ads could be targeted and sold much more flexibly than this six-month DVD method. You could put a Wifi access points and ad kiosks in each theater, too.
AOL is a significant investor in Viewpoint. Viewpoint gets a big chunk of revenue from this deal with AOL.
Whoops, hit Submit accidentally.
There's so many spectrums of spyware these days. How many Windows apps, free or not, phone home after installation or at every run? Uhm, yeah, they're only "checking for updates". Even some Windows device drivers (like some printer drivers) phone home. You don't know what any of these programs are sending, or how often they send it.
OK, I'll bite: Why is Viewpoint Media Player, which ships from Microsoft with Windows, considered spyware?8 0
Googling found this: http://www.spywareguide.com/product_show.php?id=8
When it delivers a 3D ad, it phones home with the details of whether you responded. But how many sites use their content?
I'll second the rinse-lather-repeat effectiveness of Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D, but also that Hijack This is necessary to zap some spyware. The hard part, and I mean really hard, is looking through its listings of all the potential spots where Windows will automatically run an executable.
The spyware program filenames are as confusing as possible, leading even a geek to believe they are part of Windows. Or part of the OEM install, or part of something from a printer or a camera or a USB device. The only answer is Google, then removing items carefully. Do you cut the red wire or the blue wire?
Another big problem I face in my consultancy / repair work is that there's no effective tool I've found yet that can clean a drive if the system isn't running. The removers all want to be installed on live systems. Sometimes these spyware'd systems are so slow as to be unbootable or unusable, or the net stack is hosed. Then what? I'd pay for a Knoppix-based cleaner.
Check out http://www.threedee.com/jcm/ for more history of the Terak computer and the p-System. A pure bitmap display with 320 x 240 mono graphics, pan/scroll, a software-driven speaker and sound, all designed as a desktop personal computer, wow! It's right there in the history books next to Xerox PARC machines and the PERQ.
r es/pascal.htm .
In November 1981, an Terak 8510/a with a PDP-11/03 CPU, 56K of RAM and one floppy drive was $8,935. And extra floppy drive was $2,570. You could even upgrade to color graphics at 640 x 480 by eight colors for $10,550. A ten meg hard drive was $7,985.
One of my functional Teraks was invited to take part in the 1970s History exhibit at SIGGRAPH 98, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference, the annual gathering of the computer graphics industry.
The p-System was one of the operating system alternatives for the original IBM PC, apart from MS-DOS and CP/M-86. If you can find them, the disk images for that p-System will still run in a command window under Windows, if you preload ANSI.SYS.
Another reference to the reunion is http://www.alumni.ucsd.edu/magazine/vol1no3/featu
This Terak page won the "Geek Site Of The Day" Award on October 16, 1996.
- John
I've modified these before. Yes, HR goes nuts because "no one's ever tried to change it before, everyone just signs them." Instead of giving away everything you do, just change it to say you'll agree to give them any ideas or inventions related to what it is you're hired to do. It's easy to defend that if HR and their lawyers ask you about it. And no, I don't think you need to hire a lawyer.
Let them rewrite the agreement the way that satisfies them. If they think it's OK to scratch it out and write in the margins, so be it. If they want a new draft, tell them to change it. I don't believe that any company really wants to fire you that early in the game. It's very expensive to find and hire people. They've already wasted thousands on you. They'll bend.
NASA's press releases aren't mentioning a strange object spotted by Opportunity. It's no face on Mars, but it's just as ripe for imaginative interpretation: A snail's eyestalks? A rabbit head? A sea serpent? Under "As Far as Opportunity's Eye Can See", on http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/oppor tunity/20040202a.html
there's a large panorama at: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/oppor tunity/20040202a/MSPan_B1_2x-B009R1.jpg
and look down under the sedimentary outcrop at right.
You can also see that NASA was looking at it on Sol 2,
on a series of four images taken on Sol 2, 2/3rds of the way down at: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportu nity_p002.html
but strangely it looks like those pixels are whited-out
I, too, wonder just how compatible the WET11 will be, and whether it is actually a good low-cost CPE.
8 ~roo t=dslalt~mode=flat
(I haven't played with a WET11 yet. I realize WET11 and WAP11 v1.1, 2.x are different products by different companies. I realize your O'Reilly review didn't suggest it would be good CPE, but others are suggesting that.)
I'd hoped you would compare and contrast with the WAP11 "access point client" mode. I think APC mode showed that handling multiple MACs from a single end-point would seem to be a function of the AP, not the remote equipment. For example, using WAP11 APC mode with a Cisco AP-352 would let you ping the WAP11, but nothing behind. I cloned the MAC with a Linksys BEFSR41 NAT router/fw, and presto, it would pass all traffic. Then I tried connecting a second WAP11/BEF pair to that Cisco AP, and the Cisco would reboot every time the second one associated! Cisco really doesn't want you to bridge this way. It seems deliberate, too - earlier Cisco/Aironet bridges don't do this. Do the WET11 docs explain exactly what it's doing?
Someone on a dslforum thread on WET11 at
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,391573
said it only passes a single MAC to the remote network. Isn't that bending the definition of "bridge"? If true, won't this cause trouble in some environments?
I'm so tired of companies bending definitions, stretching standards, and inventing terminology, followed by weeks and months of the user community discovering these errors and miscommunications through failure and tech support calls, when a few simple paragraphs in the docs in the most precise 7-layer and networking terminology would make it clear what a product does and doesn't do.
With the WET11, it does seem like companies are evolving towards what I agree would be a better CPE solution: something like a WET, but why not with an integrated NAT / firewall like the $80 Linksys boxes?
Better yet, combo with the VPN abilities of the BEFVP41 and BEFSX41. Hardware VPN encryption as needed, forget WEP, NAT/fw when you need it.
I've been using these at my WISP and it's working great so far: customers get VPN between remote sites (at full wireless speed when they stay on my network) plus NAT to protect their local network when on the Internet, and administratively, the VP41 and SX41 can use syslogd for logging.
Jim Kent was once known in the mid-80s for writing Zoetrope, a 2D path-based animation system for the Atari ST, not unlike today's Flash technology. Zoetrope also became Aegis Animator on the Amiga, and Autodesk's Animator Pro for the PC, which begat the .FLI/.FLC animation format. I believe Kent also worked on the first DOS generations of Autodesk's 3D Studio, too.