[SWLUG] Advice on Wireless networking

[Justin Mitchell]

On Sun, 2007-03-11 at 13:07 +0000, Neil Jones wrote:
> I am considering a wireless network. I have seen cheap devices that use
> Bluetooth etc on Ebay.
> 
> Does anyone know of any snags doing this? Is it simply just a matter of
> plugging things in? The other computer runs Windows 2000.

Bluetooth has a limited range compared to wifi (upto a 100m with the
higher powered devices, in ideal circumstances) but the bandwidth is
also a lot lower, in the hundreds of kbit/s range i believe.

that said, wifi can be a problem in linux, if your plan was just to fit
a card/dongle directly into a linux machine. the card manufacturers
arent very forthcoming on driver specs, and the chipsets change every
few months it seems, so support is erratic at best.

perhaps the easiest route is to use wifi bridges, many branded wifi
access points have a bridge or client mode. by using a pair of these you
can extended your lan from one room to another. It may cost a little
more than stand a lone cards, at about £40-£50 per unit, but its
completly OS agnostic, and allows you to put more than one computer on
each side.

eg. Linksys WAP54G access points
i use a pair of these in the house, one configured as an access point on
the main network, the other in client mode (plus a cheap switch) as a
splinter network elsewhere in the house.

one gotcha is you want to buy at least the same brand for both ends, as
there are no guarantees that they will work together smoothly otherwise,
i did start out with a mix and although it basically worked, there were
issues.

you can also use devices in wireless-bridge mode, but if you do this you
dont get the added advantage of using the access point for extra devices
like laptops, pdas, etc.