[plug] Wireless Networking - Any Advice

[James Bromberger]

On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 12:22:22PM +0800, Colin Muller wrote:
> > Can anyone advise on some appropriately priced and locally
> > available (Aust) hardware that is compatible? 
> > I had a look at the Netgear access point and cards but seems
> > like they have no drivers for Linux. Is this an issue or
> > will they work?
> 
> Possibly not "appropriately priced", but I use: 
> server->hub->Apple Airport, all connected by Ethernet cable, and then
> Lucent Wavelan pcmcia wireless cards for notebooks. Works a treat. Unless you
> have an Apple computer handy, you need a (freely-available) Windows 
> program to configure the Airport. The Lucent cards run very happily under
> Linux. All bought through Winthrop on the UWA campus.


I have a pair of second hand 2 MBit lucent silver cards (orinico). I have 
a pair of PCMCIA -> ISA bus cards I got new from Perth Cabling or somewhere 
(~$150 ea). Watch out for the PCI ones, since they sometimes require PCI2.2 
compilant bus, which you will find on PII and above chipsets, but not on 
my pair of old P100 machines. I was happily running Debian/unstable with 
2.2.18pre21 and pcmcia-cs, and using them as a bridge between two networks. 

Witha pair of 1.4 Kg Milo tins, and the appropriate holes and stuff, I made 
a pair of 10 dbi gain directional entennas. I got a pair of proprietary 
lucent dongle socket to standard type 'N' adapters and hooked it all 
together. Then Vaughan H, Nick B and I loaded this into the car and drove to 
the Kings Park lookout. The lookout has outdoor power points that work! We 
ran an extension lead down to the front underneath the lookout. and left 
Vaughan with a mobile phone and one machine booted and running.

We then jumped back in the car, and drove down the Barrack Street Jetty. 
Some problems there, and in the end, we hooked the machine in the car up to 
an inverter, and drove around until we got ping packets back. We hit 
pay dirt when we were outside the Hyatt (up the far end of the city). Nick's 
GPS gave a reading of 3.7 kms or so. Bing gave a throughput of several 
hundred kbps. Not bad given there is a fiar amount of 802.11 in the 
city already.

BTW, there was an aritcle in The Australian today about drive by hackers! 
Unsecured wireless nets. There are several around Perth that I have been 
told of. People hiding in lifts and outside buildings, hacking in with 
laptops and palm pilots, or jamming signals with baby monitors that operate 
on 2.45 GHz. I dont know how accurate this last bit is; my new cordless 
phones also use 2.45GHz, and I haven't seen any problems...

Anyway, the wavelan WEP encryption has had a lot of bad press recently. 
Searhc ./ and you will see a lot of articles talking about how 
weak the crypto is. Anyway, you should all be using more secured protocols 
and never have any plaintext passwords, right? Use SSH on *every* network, 
not just those outside of your office. Use scp to copy files instead of 
FTP/rcp. Put a self signed certicicate on your intranet and make that content 
available by both protocols.

Just a few random thoughts...

  James

-- 
 James Bromberger <james_AT_rcpt.to> www.rcpt.to/~james

       * *  C u in Bordeaux - 1st Debian Conference, July 2001 * * 
 Remainder moved to http://www.rcpt.to/~james/james/sig.html
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