[Sussex] My Home WiFi Network

[Tom Ellis]

>  * Friday - decided to get a WiFi set up for home.  Thanks for all the advice
>    guys.  So on the way home on I popped into a PC World and bought:
>      1 x NetGear MA401 PCMCIA NIC (£100)
>      1 x Belkin Wireless Cable/DSL Gateway Router (£130)

I've setup and used a belkin AP before but with out built in router.
Seemed to produce quite a good signal strength around clients house.
 
What kind of features does it have?
One of the reasons for getting the linksys wap 11 was that it had mac restrictions and 
disable ssid, for when i want to have the network private :)
Although, another clients linksys ap with switch and router, doesn't have mac restrictions 
in the way of only allowing said mac addresses, it has block said mac addresses.
Blocking mac addresses' seems a little dumb to me as only allowing certain ones would 
be a much more useful feature.

> The MA401 is listed in the kernel docs (2.4.17) as a supported device and was
> recommended by Neil so that looked like a good choice.
> 
> Neil had also said that most base stations needed a Windoz box to configure
> them, which was going to be a problem as my home network is a Windoz Free Zone.
> I do use the work's laptop but only stand-a-lone or dialled into work, it never
> get connected to my home network (well almost never).  So (although more
> expensive [~£250]) the Apple Airport Airport was better as it could be
> configured using its Java based config tool.

AFAIR the most Access Points come with crappy 'doze software on cd's that you never 
really need to use :)


> I've now been using it for a while now and the link just drops ever so often.
> Doesn't appear to be a loading problem.  I have managed to install a number of
> packages (one at a time) over it.  Also the link as been dropped when I'm just
> doing a little light (ssh) work.  But pulling and pushing the card re-establish
> the link every time.

Hmm strange, do you have any linux utilities to tell you signal strength? there must be 
some on freshmeat somewhere ;)

Well done anyway, all we need to do now is setup our own Sussex Consume page!

Tom