Playing with WAP and WLAN equipment for Wireless Ethernet

ME dugan at passwall.com
Thu Jun 14 17:47:51 PDT 2001


At SSU we have a number of Cisco WAPs throughout the library. We will be
going to eventually have coverage over the whole library and then later
the camps (plans).

Then there was the talk from Schuyler Erle and Rob Flickenger about
NoCatNet ( http://nocat.net/ ) In March earlier this year on Wireless
Ethernet.

I decided to go out and "buy me one of 'dem WAPs" and see what I could do.

The cheapest, and most versatile of the ones I found "out there" was the
one from Linksys ( BEFW11S4 ) that I managed to buy for a little over $200
which included 4 10/100 ports for a wired LAN that are switched, 1 WAN
port (10Mbps) capable of doing standard 10Base Ethernet, as well as PPPoE,
and RAS both with authentication and IP Masquerading and very, very simple
security options (turn on, turn off). Each antenna can be unscrewed from
the unit, and it appears as though each may be connected to a larger
antenna. (I won't be replacing my Linux firewall rules and policies with
the unit, but it does offer some thoughts for 2 layers of security in your
home network when used in such a fashion.)

After getting it, Andru and I tested it and found it worked fine with our
Cisco AiroNet 340 cards from windows, but not from Linux. We upgraded all
of the firmware to all of the latest from Cisco for the Card from the web
and the Linksys from their ftp site, but it still did not work with
Linux. (We knew the cards worked with Linux with the Cisco WAPs, but Linux
would not accept return packets from the WAP even though they were really
sent. Even tcpdump showed them as arriving, but the OS did not.)

Skipping ahead, I found a forum with some linksys developers and they have
a beta firmware update for the unit. After installing the beta firmweare
upgrade, Linux is happy with the WLAN traffic and gets it IP address as it
should.

I just thought I would share this with everyone else that might be looking
at WAPs and having problems with Linux and them. I think this WAP is one
of the cheapest on the market.

However, I have not had enough time to test this to know how stable and
reliable it is. The firmware is of course - beta at present.

Last, playing with the D-Link DWL-650 Wireless 802.11b ($70.00 / each and 
PCMCIA) I saw they were in the PCMCIA supported cards, but it appears the
chipset may have changed since the early support D-LINK DWL-650 card were
included in the PCMCIA-cs by D. Hinds et al. I may have to return these
cards and go with something else instead.

Anyway, enjoy.

-ME

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GCS/CM$/IT$/LS$/S/O$ !d--(++) !s !a+++(-----) C++$(++++) U++++$(+$) P+$>+++ 
L+++$(++) E W+++$(+) N+ o K w+$>++>+++ O-@ M+$ V-$>- !PS !PE Y+ !PGP
t at -(++) 5+@ X@ R- tv- b++ DI+++ D+ G--@ e+>++>++++ h(++)>+ r*>? z?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
decode: http://www.ebb.org/ungeek/ about: http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html
     Systems Department Operating Systems Analyst for the SSU Library





More information about the talk mailing list