[SWLUG] Re: Giving up Windows

[Foeh Mannay]

I have a Netgear wifi router DG824M (the old 802.11b one). I have to say
it's absolute dog s**t. It's supposed to relay DNS (not sure whether it
caches) but it does an ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE job of it. It can take up to
20-25 attempts to resolve a hostname from client PCs. Also it doesn't
support RTS which means lots of retransmits, and you can't run it in
ad-hoc mode so printing between laptop and PC is ruled out totally (I
don't have 45 minutes to print a 2 page document, thanks). It also
doesn't do any form of bridge mode, so you can't use it if you have a
snazzy ISP that allows you more than one IP.

As an aside, when I was on cable, routed, cached DNS and proxied with my
linux machine and used a wireless access point everything worked fine.
I'd wire the laptop & desktop into a switch and use the AP as a client,
but despite what it says in black and white on the box and manual, the
netgear AP won't play access point client to even another netgear
branded product in access point mode!

As you can guess, I'd recommend netgear to anyone... NOT!

OTOH the netgear wifi cards (PCI & PCMCIA) work great in Linux, even
allowing me to use monitor mode to sniff encrypted traffic.

Foeh

On Wed, 2005-03-02 at 15:24, Gerald Davies wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 14:46:03 +0000, Adam Rykala <adam at rykala.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> > I used http://speedtouchconf.sourceforge.net's software and instructions -
> > worked like a charm
> 
> i wish i could say the same.  i tried that and quite a few other
> tutorials, but i think i'm a few distros before things got supported.
> the box is a p200 with 64megs of ram and i'm a bit sceptical about
> installing anything remotely new on it. i'm one of those
> geeks/cheapskates that likes to get the most out of hardware and uses
> it for years :-)
> 
> i dunno, i'll wait and see tonight if my DSL is activated before
> making decisions.
> 
> i know i'm asking a lot, but do any of the modern ADSL wifi routers
> come with some form of basic DNS capability?   (i'd miss my crappy
> p200 doing DNS for me, unless of course i run it on something else). 
> I've noticed there are "super" wifi routers around like the netgear. 
> they mention DNS but i don't know if they mean "it'll forward requests
> to your dns servers of choice"...etc.  Also static-IP addresses in the
> DHCP would be useful too for obvious reasons. heh.
> 
> Any recommendations whilst I'm on this subject?
> 
> g
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