802.11 wireless lan buying decision

[bernjuer]

Hi,

anyone out there with 802.11 equipment running?

We need to move houses and I can lay my trusty CAT5-cables at the
new location. So I thought of using wireless. Setup will be like this:

1. floor: wife's PC (windows[1]) and my workstation (gentoo, what else?)
ground floor: dsl router box (gentoo, what else?)
garden/roaming: laptop (gentoo, what else?)

I thought of buying 4 USB-802.11b - Adapters from Netgear (MA101),
since goolging showed that there are linux drivers for those.

I don't think I need an access point, the adapters can talk to
each other, right?

Any comments on this?


Thanks,
Bernd

[1] she needs a special font typesetting software
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sigs are boring

[sprprsnmn]

The MA101 works fine under linux. The place you want to go to is atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net

While you *shouldn't* need an access point with your wireless cards, I'd recommend taht you do so. Ad-hoc mode is... flaky sometimes. Also, take advice from one who got burned, DON'T use an smp enabled kernel. The computer hard locks up every time.

Other than that, wireless LAN's rock.

Sprprsnmn

[oniq]

I set up a wireless LAN for the various laptops in my house. I bought a D-Link DI-614+ access point/router and its kickass. It has one of the most sophisticated and feature plentiful designs in a low cost solution that I have ever seen. You can set up encryption in various bits (64, 128, 256), it supports 11Mb and 22Mb, as well as having 4 ethernet ports. Also you can setup disallowing certain access at certain times to certain machines (by MAC address or by IP address), port forwarding at certain times (by MAC address or by IP addresss), PPPoE, and many many other features. I paid $130, and I sent away for my $50 rebate. So thats $80 for a NICE router. Personally, I have only used PCMCIA network cards (a 3Com Airconnect which isn't as widely supported but works fine!, and a D-Link DWL-650 Prism2 based card which is very widely supported in various wardriving programs as well as other network monitoring applications).
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