[Liverpool] Wireless access points?

[Stephen Watkin]

Hi Sebastian,

I had a good look at the wifi drivers page - what I found is (at least 
for the hardware I've got to hand) that although it states the drivers 
work in master mode on their wiki, you try it, it doesn't work, and some 
amount of Googling later you find some off-hand post on some mailing 
list from one of the devs saying they decided to disable the AP mode 
because it was buggy and they wanted to ship a solid driver for the 
kernel. I've no doubt that it'd work great if you manage to get hold of 
the right combination of hardware and drivers and software, but it's 
looking to me like it'd be cheaper and easier just to get another 
plastic box.

As it happens, I've got a Netgear in the office that I have the same old 
problems with. Every couple of weeks without fail I have to reset it - 
and this was after I had to return the first one to the shop because it 
was DOA. It's a few years old (one of the black square ones) but it's 
never worked right. I don't know if it's something I'm doing or if I'm 
just having really bad luck!

Ste



On 20/02/11 10:41, Sebastian wrote:
> 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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>
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