[Nottingham] Social / website / Wireless Router - questions, any recommendations?

[Steve Dickman]

David,

you can buy stuff out there that are a router, wireless access point and 
firewall combined. Linksys WRt54G are pretty good giving you a four port 
switch as well as an AP. The firewall is fairly basic but gives as good 
a protection as most Windoze software ones. You can restrict wireless 
MACs as well as putting on WEP (highly recommended). They are about £85. 
The web interface is standard and you don't need the Windoze install 
disks at all as long as you know the default IP address of the router, 
best to put in an infrastucture network and not an ad-hoc. I have a 
mixed Mac/Linux and XP network (can't get the wife off Windoze) and it 
all works fine around the house, including streaming music with slim server!

Steve

Hope that helps.

Steve

David Aldred wrote:

>Hi everyone - have a good time this evening.  I can't be there, sorry.
>
>
>Martin: the website.  Does it support PHP/MySQL?  If so, I've got a php/mysql 
>driven diary system for a club website which we could port across, allowing 
>you (or anyone else you authorise) to log in from any browser and 
>add/edit/delete events, whether or not you've got admin access to the server.  
>Interested?   I wrote it for a folk club a couple of years ago, and haven't 
>had to rewrite their events page since, because the non-HTML-literate 
>committee can now update it themselves!
>
>
>Now the bigger question: I set up a wireless network in the house months ago, 
>just on an ad-hoc network.  It works, but there are bits of the house which 
>are 'dead', and of course the whole thing is dependent on the main 
>net-connected PC being (a) on and (b) not tempramental about its own wireless 
>usb thingy (for a week recently it was needing a service network restart 
>every few hours to allow anything else to connect: an accidental reboot seems 
>to have sorted it, no idea why!)
>
>I'm hoping people here can help with getting my thoughts straight on this....  
>I'm starting wth basics in case I'm misunderstanding anything that early on!
>
>AIUI, the basic idea is that a router has the cable modem plugged into it on 
>one 'side', and on the other 'side' provides both ethernet sockets and a 
>wireless access point.  I can plug my  main PC and the other one in the same 
>room into ethernet ports, and use wireless elsewhere in the house.  
>
>It seems that the routers are configured using a web-style interface; they 
>claim to provide a firewall as well.
>
>So, questions before I visit ebay......
>
>1.  Am I right in assuming that it doesn't matter (from the pov of setting up  
>a router which uses a web-style setup interface) what OS is on any of the 
>PC's?   Many of them seem to have the usual CD "for Windows 98/ME/XP..." - is 
>this just clag to make Windozers happy?
>
>2.  How much use are the firewalls?  To what extent do I still need to 
>firewall the machines on the 'inside'?  
>
>3.  Do these things enable restriction of connection to specific MACs, to put 
>one barrier in the way of anyone in a car outside getting at my systems? 
>
>4.  Is there anything else to think about from the Linux pov before I start?  
>Is it likely that any router will have a fit when it doesn't find Windows on 
>the end of a connection?
>
>5.  Any specific recommendations for good routers?  Or specific 
>de-recommendations for bad ones?  
>
>  
>