[Liverpool] Wireless access points?

[Sebastian]

Hi Ste,

Just my 0.5 cents worth. I've installed quite a lot of routers, mainly 
for home users, and some for businesses the past few years. For me, the 
ones that have lasted the best have been the Netgear ones. Also, they 
are the ones with least wifi signal and ADSL sync problems.

There has been a persistent and consistent problem with the square 
shaped white generation (not round at the corners) where after 1-2 years 
they start to have problems with the power supply. There is a thread 
somewhere on Netgear forums full of complaints. This manifests itself in 
that all the lights on the router go off, and the power light goes 
orange or red (depending on model). Hower, even in that case, I have two 
clients with this problem for over a year - and we just take the power 
supply out, let it cool off/rest for 5 minutes and plug it back in 
(several times if necessary) - until the power light goes green. Other 
then that - they've been rock solid for me.

On the second subject of running Linux as an access point - I am a big 
fan of the idea. At home I have a 6 year old Compaq laptop which has 
been running for 2 years now as my all-in-on wifi AP, home server, 
Asterisk box, OpenVPN server, cctv server etc. I really like the idea of 
integrating so many functions in one box - but having the convenience of 
the x86 platform at my fingertips, with internal hdd storage, monitor 
and keyboard (useful during the initial installation), drivers for a 
variety of peripherals etc.

If you go down this route, you have to keep in mind that only some wifi 
chipsets will allow you to run in host/master mode. A good starting 
point is the Linux kernel wifi driver pages - where you can quickly 
determine if you have what it takes on the chipset side of things (under 
the 'AP' column):

http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers

Let me know if you need more info on configuring hostapd.


Sebastian

On 02/19/2011 12:33 PM, Stephen Watkin wrote:
> I'm at the end of my tether with consumer wireless routers / access
> points. Every single one I've ever had anything to do with has been a
> complete nightmare. They either randomly crash and need rebooting every
> few weeks, or randomly forget or ignore their settings (such as port
> forwarding) or break completely for no apparent reason. At this point
> I'm utterly convinced they are all garbage.
>
> As you might have guessed, my access point at home has just failed and I
> need a replacement. Rather than just sink £50 into another bit of
> plastic tat, I heard you can run an access point off a Linux box. I had
> a stab at setting that up last night but I didn't get very far. There's
> a program called 'hostapd' which can run an access point off an attached
> wifi device. I managed to get the daemon up and running, and to get a
> client to connect associate with it, but I couldn't so much as ping
> anything through the connection. As I understand it, the problem could
> be a few different things - either hostapd isn't configured right, or
> the bridge interface on the router isn't configured right, or the
> wireless driver flat-out just doesn't support runnining in AP mode
> (which wouldn't suprise me, as they're all crappy broadcom ones with
> bodged drivers).
>
> Does anyone have any experience with this? Or can anyone recommend me a
> dedicated wireless router that isn't complete shit?
>
> Ste
>
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