[SWLUG] Advice on Wireless networking

[Glenn Booth]

Hi Neil,

On 11/03/07, Neil Jones <neil at nwjones.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi Folks,
>
> I am just looking for any advice. This is the situation.
>
> I am considering a wireless network. I have seen cheap devices that use
> Bluetooth etc on Ebay.


I did exactly this using two Belkin wireless access points between my house
and
my shed. It worked fine, but using these devices meant having ethernet cards
in
both machines. Eventually I got around to running cat5e across the garden
and
stopped using them, but it was a decent stop-gap solution.

I would avoid bluetooth, due to range/bandwidth limitations. It can also be
a royal
pain in the backside to configure on some distributions. You can
realistically
expect about 25 Mbits/sec from 802.11g, which is way higher than you'll get
from
bluetooth, and range is better too (in my experience). The 54MBps rating is
a
combination of fiction and ambitious marketing, IMO.

Does anyone know of any snags doing this? Is it simply just a matter of
> plugging things in? The other computer runs Windows 2000.


As someone else mentioned, stick with devices from the same manufacturer
if you want to run them in a kind of 'bridge mode'. I tried mixing a Belkin
unit with
Speedtouch 802.11g and Draytek 802.11g wireless routers and had problems.

Hope this helps,

Glenn.
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