[Wylug-help] OT: WLan setup

[gARetH baBB]

On Mon, 6 Oct 2003, Gary Stainburn wrote:

> 1) I asume that two hubs will talk to each other quite happily - yes?

I'm going to presume by "hub" you actually mean some form of AP, as
otherwise it doesn't really make sense. Ish.

> 2) would I get better performance hub to hub than I would PC card to PC card
> or PC card to hub?

An AP is just a PC card (or at least the same chipset, though alot of APs
are just inserted PC cards) in a lightweight embedded platform and a bit
of extra firmware.

[as an aside and to demonstrate the madness it came to, not long ago the
cheapest way to get a orinoco based PCMCIA card was to buy some
manufacturer's *USB* version and inside the device was a PCMCIA card
inserted into a little board ...]

> 3) Can you configure hubs so that they will only talk to another specified
> device - i.e. the other hub?

Probably, you'd have to check the documentation for your chosen AP.

You can usually lock to MAC address; of course a MAC address is trivial to
change ...

I would also confirm whichever device you do get will actually do
bridging.

> 5) Are any of these devices secure enough to do without the Linux firewalls?

Extremely unlikely, unless you want to pay - and there's no real point in
the extra costs when you have Linux doing it all.

Personally I would recommend you get two linux boxes, one at either end,
shove wireless cards in them and do everything like that instead of
mucking about with APs, but that's me ...